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Boston College Increases Student-Teacher Collaboration

“Before introducing Socialtext Workspace into our classrooms, we struggled to try to create an environment for active, ongoing interactions between our students and faculty using existing tools. With Socialtext, we've been able to leverage the power of wikis to create a rich collaborative environment both inside and outside the classroom that drives the learning process forward. Students like the interactive educational environment created by Socialtext workspaces. They see Socialtext as a powerful tool that helps them connect and improve their scores.”

Background

As one of the oldest Jesuit, Catholic universities in the US, Boston College confers more than 4,000 degrees annually in more than 50 fields of study through seven schools and colleges. Faculty members are committed to both teaching and research and have set new marks for research grant awards over the last ten years, more than $44 million in the last year alone. Boston College has experienced tremendous growth in recent years, including a 43 percent increase in undergraduate applications over the past decade. During the same period, a remarkable increase in revenue from voluntary giving has helped to move the university's endowment to approximately $1.4 billion, which puts Boston College among the 50 largest university endowments in the nation.

Sought a way to facilitate more collaborative learning

Educational institutions like Boston College increasingly depend on web-based tools to facilitate learning and foster collaboration between students and between students and faculty. Schools are increasingly under pressure to incorporate the latest Web 2.0 technologies into the education process, since many students come to school expecting access to these tools and commonly use them in their personal lives as a way to connect and exchange with peers. Web sites and applications like MySpace, Flickr, Facebook, Wikipedia, instant messaging and blogging are already widely adopted by students. The challenge for educational institutions is finding ways to incorporate existing tools into the classroom experience, and identifying new tools that can add value to the education process.

Every business student that passes through Boston College takes the Introduction to Management class. The professors leading this class previously tried to better connect students and facilitate by using the discussion board capabilities of sites like Facebook. The consumer solutions fell short, however, as they did not provide adequate discussion capabilities and lacked features needed for collaborative content creation, editing, revision history, and commenting.

Enriches the classroom experience

Boston College evaluated various options for increasing student collaboration, and decided on Socialtext Workspace, opting for the hosted service. Boston College uses Socialtext Workspace to provide a valuable framework for real-time discussions in the classroom. The Socialtext collaboration platform enriches the classroom by introducing up-to-date content and encouraging active discussion. For example, using RSS feeds, the Intro to Management class integrates relevant news content from sites like The Wall Street Journal, Businessweek and The New York Times, creating a ‘virtual newstand’ to support in-class activities. The class curriculum is then modified on-the-fly to reflect the latest events in the business world.

Enables students to connect and collaborate better

Students use Socialtext Workspace in many different ways to collaborate with one another. For example, before submitting research papers, students use the wiki to gather feedback from their peers so they can improve the quality of their final paper before submitting it to the professor for grading.

Professors have found that Socialtext helps them deliver higher quality courses with students providing input and ideas on topics to cover in class, and everyone contributing to the classroom learning. One professor went so far as to suggest that wikis hold the potential to replace traditional textbooks in the future, as textbooks are often out of date as soon as they are printed and include static information that cannot be changed or updated on the fly.

Using Socialtext, faculty and students jointly add content to the wiki and collaborate on that content. They are notified when new updates are made, and can see who made each update. They also add content to wiki pages by emailing directly to the wiki page that needs updating. Socialtext Workspace makes it easy for administrators and faculty at Boston College to add and delete users, as students enroll and then graduate from the Intro to Management class.

Drives the learning process forward

Boston College finds that it takes less than 30 minutes on average for a new user to get fully productive and competent with the Socialtext collaboration platform. About 100 to 200 users each semester participate in the Intro to Management workspace, powered by Socialtext. This accounts for over 100 page views and roughly ten page edits per student per week. The professors are finding that the students that contribute most actively on the wiki are often different than those who participate most actively in live classroom discussions. Using Socialtext Workspace, professors can more easily engage all students and track student participation. One of the most interesting outcomes of Boston College’s wiki use is a clear correlation of the wiki use to higher overall grades and test scores.

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