Recently, our department began work on a project to identify information new students would need to ease their transition to college. The goal was to begin the work on a BlackBoard module set that could be shared with students before they arrived on campus. This process was initiated by our Director and I was given Faculty lead.
We had a nice mix of skills and perspectives around the working table and this was supplemented by others outside our group who were invited to submit information or who participated in meetings led by our Director in order to give input.
The primary form of communication was face-to-face meetings in small groups about every other working day with lots of brainstorming with larger group meetings once a week for updates and goal setting for the next week. Email communication was frequent. Given that we were all from the same institution and the core group all worked in Student Services, this process worked well for us.
The fact that we brought different skills to the table also helped our team. We had a good mix of big picture, strategy thinkers and detail oriented implementors. We had faculty, support staff and administrators on the team as well. In addition, we had students contributing their skills and ideas in the area of HTML and CSS as well as their impressions of the work from a student perspective.
Missing at the table was a representative from the IT department. This would have been helpful to address some of our questions and concerns in a more timely fashion.
This post was created as part of the Collobrator Module for Ontario Extend.
Original dinner table Photo by Stella de Smit on Unsplash
