Adopt & Embrace's

Office 365 Use Case:

Collaborating across universities to create shared academic outcomes

As someone in...

…teaching and course design

We have several masters programs across multiple universities in Europe, as well as online courses. Many who teach these courses are designing them as well. Although we teach different things, our expertise comes together to contribute to the same subject matter.

I'm faced with...

…a disconnected model of how we collaborate across multiple universities

Often our alliance of universities are collaborating for the same outcome. One university is teaching a wind energy engineering course. Another is helping to build a business model for that course. Another is an expert in AI/data coming from wind energy systems. The way we collaborate is by emails and meetings which is slow, frustrating and not collaborative/engaging enough. Often, we don’t know what others know, and never find out. People are reluctant to send too many emails – so behaviours like sharing articles and research don’t happen often in fear of spamming people, so we save our emails for high priority needs. Which is a pity, because sometimes a casual share of an article or experience is what could trigger our next innovation.

I want to...

...enable a multi-university collaboration hub

We want a sense of place to encourage discussion, and to also enable weekly questions and sharing that may trigger opportunities. Everything will then be findable in its place. We like that creating posts doesn’t constantly notify like email does, unless you are @mentioned. In this respect we can now share articles without having to necessarily @mention people and they can have visibly to them and read them without the expense of being overwhelmed by notifications.

Using...

…Teams, Files, OneNote, Planner and Forms

This would require a Team for each course. Each made of up channels that represent topics covered in each course. The types of things we would do is ask for help, share articles, give feedback/review, reach out for opportunities, guest meetings, collaborate on initiatives, etc. OneNote would be used as a dumping ground for research notes and Planner to track our tasks. Forms would be used for stakeholder surveys/feedback/beta readers.

I'll know this is
successful when...

…our collaboration hub is thriving more than our sporadic emails and meetings

  • We are less frustrating and more fluid
  • There are more opportunities triggered and experiences shared
  • There is a streamlined way to create resources and locate them
  • External barriers are no longer a barrier
  • We are creating stronger relationships between peers

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