I believe that many of you are academic researchers as well as research students' supervisors. And I think you would agree with me that your students are easier to track down online (e.g. on Facebook). Gradually, I developed a habit of communicating and discussing research ideas with the students using these online social networks. However, I find it difficult to collect the discussions which have occurred on these platforms. The messaging services/chatrooms in particular. Is there any good collaborative platform that solve this problem. Well, I know you would probably mention Google's or Version Controls. They are good if you have a well-planned project to run. What about those discussions or casual chats during random brainstormings or daily interactions? The ideal platform would be like a note-taker to record all these little things. Of course, it would also support the usual stuff like emailing and file-transferring. I'd like to hear your ideas and maybe how you use existing technologies such as FB/Whatsapp to achieve the same goal.
I am using debategraph(http://debategraph.org/Stream.aspx?nid=285510&vt=bubble&dc=focus), which force me what, how and why I think.
Nuclear issues, data issues and business issues are on the platform, and one by one they are opened.
Please enjoy.
I think Chalkup can help you do this really well!
https://www.chalkup.co/tour/messaging
You can share files, write in LaTeX. In addition to messaging there are also discussion features for brainstorming or having Q/A.
I would be happy to give you a tour and show you how to use it for professor-student communication and live office hours.. etc. (also it's free!)
Send me a message!
Thanks for all the great answers! They open up lots of different possibilities in addition to what I was initially looking for.
Aleksandra, Trello is terrific, especially when we need to do the card sorting for organizing design ideas!
Shuichi, Depategraph looks interesting, it might be good for writing papers.
Justin, Chalkup is really great! except that I can't find my school in the drop-down list...(looks like they only contain schools in the US) Otherwise it seems to be a nice option.
podio.com is a great tool to communicate with a team, up to five members is free I think, you create apps within this platform so making it as customized as possible. Take a look, it is great and works on android and iOS.
My school use Canvas by Instructure. It has a good mobile app and supports calendar events subscription.
If you are looking for a collaboration platform that supports communication and sharing practice of the whole university - not only single courses, maybe you would be interested in a tool, that was developed by the Interfacedesign department of the university of applied sciences in Potsdam?
https://about.incom.org
We have tried several project managers such as :
https://basecamp.com/ : pro and good but complex for students
http://www.taskii.com/ : good and simple, free for schools but not sustained anymore
They are good ways to exchange and publish internally, they can also be secured, but studying projects have many specific needs for which it is difficult to find a good platform. We also tried GroupCam and others, unsuccessfully, because most project manager softwares are made for buisness and task oriented.
I dream of one that would allow a teacher or a project manager to create the project, add the list of participants, give them status, create optionnal functionalities according to each project :
- Project page
- Adress book
- Agenda
- Messages and mailings
- Documents
- Personnal pages
- Assignments
- Submissions
- Accounts
- Notes
...
My team is using Trello, and it has been very useful for "bottom up" team interactions. Everyone leads, in that sense, so it is a true "collaboration" tool.
Basecamp is simple to use. It is a self-contained platform, which gives the user full control of who views their content. Clean and clear. Not free but the Uni should pay all subscription fees.
Can anyone recommend a good collaborative platform for supervisor-student communications?
For my PhD pursuit last time with my supervisor, we used the following means to communicate which we think are effective:
I hope frequent email and face-to-face meeting is better than using a platform. If the supervisor is far away, skype will do the required task. To the best of my knowledge, no platform or tool is as effective as face-to-face meeting.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Mathematics