An Introduction to Collaboration with SharePoint for First-Year Business Students

1. INTRODUCTION In today's global economy, it is increasingly important for employees to have strong collaboration skills; "sharing information and expertise can be critical in driving both individual and organizational success" (IBM, 2008). Web 2.0 technologies are increasingly being used as strategic business tools to connect employees, customers, and suppliers, and the student who enters the job market with a solid understanding of collaboration will have an advantage over other job seekers (Sendall, 2008). Even in technical positions, soft skills, including collaboration, are valued in college graduates (Marsan, 2009). Collaboration is the practice of two or more people working together to create a single end product; that product may be a design, a paper, a concept or some other result, but with collaboration the end product is always the result of the combined input of everyone in the group. Numerous products facilitate sharing of information over the internet, but information sharing by itself is not sufficient; true collaboration requires that students learn to work together in creating one deliverable that is the product of all members of the team. When asked about group projects, students in an introductory business class will quickly confirm that most of their group work does not result in a single deliverable developed by the entire team, but rather a merger of individually prepared components of the assignment. This is the pattern we address in teaching collaboration concepts--moving from combining parts into a single entity to actually creating that entity as a whole, with contributions from every team member. While collaboration is possible without the use of a software product, the approach presented here uses Microsoft SharePoint, and would work with other collaboration tools as well. Images are provided to clarify how SharePoint supports the concepts, however the intent is not to present a SharePoint tutorial, but rather an approach, using specific assignments, to teaching the concept of collaboration using SharePoint. 2. METHODOLOGY 2.1 Making the Case for Collaboration Before focusing on the mechanics of any collaboration tool, we discuss the concepts of collaboration in the classroom. As Charles Waltner (2009) states, "simply "planting" networking tools is not enough." Collaboration activities within an organization require "a concerted focus on building a culture of collaboration" (Waltner, 2009). The following exercises demonstrate how a group charged with a task could accomplish that task much more effectively through good collaboration practices. In both exercises the students are working face-to-face without any particular tool, building a preliminary understanding of the benefits of collaboration and setting the tone for even more effective use of a collaboration tool and its features. Exercise 1: This exercise facilitates a discussion on good collaboration by having the students observe the drawbacks of a poor collaboration process. The class identifies several problems at their university that they would like to solve collaboratively. Usually 3-5 good options are presented; however, the issue of on-campus parking works well and allows everyone to provide some input. The instructor should divide the class into groups of 4-5 students so that the exercise can be completed fairly quickly, leaving sufficient time for in-class discussion. The students are not permitted to talk and each has only one opportunity to provide input before submitting their solution. The exercise proceeds as follows: one student in each group will write his or her thoughts regarding a solution to the problem on a piece of paper and then pass it on to the next student until each student in the group has had one chance to record their thoughts. The instructor will then collect the responses, and read some of them to the class. As responses are read, students may think of additional solutions or variations of the proposed solutions but will have no chance to contribute further--the solutions cannot be modified. …