Washington State University

University Uses Web-Based Collaboration Platform for Student-Centered Learning

The Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology (CTLT) at Washington State University (WSU) is well known for its research into how technology can encourage student-centered learning. The CTLT had been looking for collaboration technologies to integrate into university curriculum so that students can take control of their learning experience and reach beyond the boundaries of the classroom. The CTLT found such a technology with Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007. Using the My Site feature, students can create their own workspaces, reflect on their learning, and share information with people inside and outside the university. All over WSU, students and faculty are using My Site to move beyond traditional classroom learning, better preparing graduates for using collaborative digital technologies in the workplace.

 

Situation

Washington State University (WSU) opened its doors in January 1892. Today, WSU is Washington state's largest land-grant university and offers more than 200 fields of study. The flagship 620-acre campus is located in Pullman, and WSU has regional campuses in Vancouver, Spokane, and the state’s Tri-Cities area.

Students using Office SharePoint Server 2007 will gain experience with collaboration and intellectual property management tools that will provide a personal foundation for the lifelong learning process. Nils Peterson Assistant Director, Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology, WSU

The Information Technology Services (ITS) department at WSU provides IT administrative and support services to the university. Its collaboration with the university’s award-winning Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology (CTLT) underscores the university’s interest in blending pedagogy and technology to improve learning outcomes. “We partner with ITS to develop assessment-centered integration of technology with student learning,” says Gary Brown, Director of the Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology at WSU. “We are committed to the advancement of authentic learning—learning that takes place in and beyond the classroom—that encourages the exchange of knowledge across disciplinary, institutional, and national boundaries, and that recognizes the need for participation in a global dialogue.”

Aiming for Learning Ownership

According to Nils Peterson, Assistant Director of the Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology at WSU, the future of education lies in putting students at the center of their personal learning experience. The challenge is to find the right technology tools for students to become engaged with learning beyond the classroom, dissolving institutional, cultural, intellectual, and international boundaries. “We need to refocus technology in education to provide students with their own learning space to reflect not only on what they are learning, but on how they are learning,” says Peterson.  Brown calls this approach “learning ownership.” He explains: “This would put students squarely in the center of their learning network, which starts with their classmates and their professors and extends out through the university to the rest of the world through digital communications and social networking.”

Moving Toward Collaboration

Collaboration is a founding principle for this new model of learning. Students are accustomed to collaborating online with social networking tools such as Facebook, but this has not been encouraged in education, where faculty tend to think of collaboration as cheating. “When students leave school, they will enter jobs where collaboration and virtual teams are commonplace,” says Brown. “Our learning environment should give students opportunities to collaborate across the curriculum, both within the university and beyond. The student should always be in control of the intellectual connections he or she wants to make to shape his or her learning.”

Looking for “Worldware”

To achieve collaborative, student-centered learning that would be relevant for life, the CTLT began looking for a tool that students would likely use once they graduate. This sort of tool falls under the moniker “worldware.” Coined by education expert Steve Ehrmann, the term describes software applications that have a substantial market outside the educational sector, but are also valued for teaching and learning. Microsoft® Office software is a familiar example. 

“Inherent in the worldware concept is the idea of flexibility, and this also appealed to us,” says Brown. “A tool that meets the needs of students and educators, as well as the needs of people working in all kinds of organizations is, by definition, flexible. At the university, we were getting boxed in with commercial vendors for the educational sector, whose products did not offer lifelong relevance. How many students are going to graduate and go to work and use the Blackboard Learning System?”

Solution

In 2006, the ITS department decided to roll out Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003, which it already licensed as part of its Campus Agreement with Microsoft. The Campus Agreement is a subscription licensing program developed for higher education institutions, and Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 was part of the Desktop Package to which the university subscribed. However, the ITS needed a business case for deploying this communication and collaboration solution across the campus, and it turned to the CTLT for help.

SharePoint technologies showed us what students can accomplish when they have control of a very powerful space like My Site...It's a very flexible and freeing learning tool Nils Peterson Assistant Director, Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology WSU

“We knew that the CTLT was looking for technology tools to foster student-centered learning environments,” says Debby Lawson, Director of ITS at Washington State University. “The CTLT expressed interest in using the My Site feature within Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 for students to enter their own content and collaborate on assignments.”

My Site provides students with a single location from which to manage documents, content, and individual tasks, and conduct collaborative teamwork. Students can create their own workspaces and share content and documents with people inside and outside the university. Under the terms of the Campus Agreement, My Site would also be available to all faculty and staff at WSU. To help the CTLT understand how students used My Site and other SharePoint technologies to document their learning, in January 2007, Peterson decided to offer an ePortfolio contest.

“Students can create an ePortfolio within their My Site. It is an electronic collection of evidence that demonstrates a person’s learning journey over time, and it may relate to specific academic fields or to lifelong learning,” says Peterson. “The key aspect of the ePortfolio is a student’s reflection on the learning process, including their mistakes. The contest finalists impressed us with their innovative and insightful use of their personal spaces to document learning journeys.”For example, one contestant used the ePortfolio environment to reflect on a paper she wrote earlier in her freshman year, where she shared her learning growth with site visitors: “What the heck are diffusion bonding and casting methods? My guess is that I was parroting an article.”

Shortly after the contest, in June 2007, ITS took advantage of the Software Assurance portion of its Campus Agreement to upgrade to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. In Office SharePoint Server 2007, there are enhanced features to My Site that better enable social networking. For example, the My Sites can contain Web parts, RSS feeds to internal or external content, page links to personal and public blogs, wikis, lists, and document libraries. These features encourage information discovery for My Site visitors and facilitate social interaction through sharing common interests and feedback on the content. Staffers in the CTLT were excited about these enhancements because they supported their goals for improved collaboration across the curriculum, both within the university and beyond.

Benefits

For the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology at WSU, the move to Office SharePoint Server 2007provides a rich field for research into how students can benefit from learning with collaborative technologies they are likely to encounter later in life. To support this research, the CTLT sponsored another ePortfolio contest, which ended in March 2008, wherein students learned how to use the technology to reach beyond the classroom to collaborate with different entities, enriching the self-reflective learning experience. And across WSU, students and faculty are integrating their My Site personal sites into the curriculum and into campus life to enrich faculty/student relationships and improve learning outcomes.

Supports University Research on Student-Centered Learning

With Office SharePoint Server 2007 now available to students and faculty, the CTLT can continue its research into technology that’s even better suited for student-centered, collaborative, and self-reflective learning. “Last year’s ePortfolio contest provided a setting to get ideas and examples of how students took ownership of their learning, which we could then take to the faculty and integrate into classrooms to further improve the learning environment at WSU,” says Brown. “A new ePortfolio contest using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 would take us further along this journey. We are excited about SharePoint because the technology is so flexible and powerful it can be rendered to support students’ unique approaches and purposes for learning.”

For example, Kelley Waldin, one of two second-place winners in the 2008 ePortfolio contest, does not have a technology background. She is an MBA graduate who worked with another student to create an EEG Patient Monitory System ePortfolio that documented their collaboration with faculty, the WSU Research Foundation, inventors, and engineers to develop a business plan for a wireless EEG patient monitoring device developed at WSU. Her experience underscores the value of educational technology that provides her with life-long, relevant skills to ensure her success in the workplace. “I found the technology intuitive and easy to learn, despite having no Web design experience or any idea how to write HTML code,” Waldin reports. “I’m used to Microsoft Office products, and it had the same look and feel. Creating the ePortfolio was a great experience that gave me a lot of confidence that I could work with Office SharePoint Server 2007 in any job setting.”

Facilitates Student-Centered Learning and Collaboration

The enhancements to the My Site feature in Office SharePoint Server 2007 were of particular interest to the staff at CTLT, who decided that the new ePortfolio contest should focus on collaboration. Their hopes that the new version would take them further along in understanding how technology could put students in control of their learning process as they reached out to collaborate with others were fulfilled.

Our learning environment should give students opportunities to collaborate across the curriculum, both within the university and beyond. Gary Brown Director of the Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology WSU

“SharePoint technologies showed us what students can accomplish when they have control of a very powerful space like My Site, where they act as the administrator in control of authorization down to a fine level of granularity,” says Peterson. “The students benefit from creating personal learning environments that they can share or not, as desired. It’s a very flexible and freeing learning tool. When individual students take charge of their own learning environment, it is possible to redefine what it means to literally put the learner in the center. When classroom walls dissolve it is not chaos that emerges, but diversity of innovation. These were capabilities we didn’t see from other vendors, and with Office SharePoint Server 2007, the tools got more refined in a way that added greatly to the whole ePortfolio experience.”

With Office SharePoint Server 2007, students can take advantage of two major improvements to facilitate collaboration outside the university boundary:

• Anonymous access: By enabling anonymous access to an ePortfolio, a student can allow anonymous users to browse his or her entire ePortfolio. This way, students can publish their ePortfolio to the world while retaining control over the privacy of their content on other pages of their My Site.
• Really Simple Syndication (RRS) feeds: Students can incorporate and publish constantly updated content from other sites, including blogs, podcasts, and news headlines.

“These are all capabilities that facilitate reaching out, and they demonstrate how Office SharePoint Server 2007 is valuable as worldware,” says Brown. “SharePoint technologies allow this because they are both simple and ubiquitous.”

Embraces Global Outreach

CTLT staff is excited about the potential the improvements in Office SharePoint Server 2007 bring to the ePortfolio experience. “Office SharePoint Server 2007 helps bring the ePortfolio outside of the university,” says Brown. “With the second contest, we saw students reaching out to create a learning community that extends into the world.”

For example, the 2008 grand-prize winning ePortfolio, called the Kayafungo Women’s Water Project, documented the efforts of Engineers without Borders at WSU as they partnered with the Student Movement for Real Change to provide clean water to 35,000 people in Kayafungo, Kenya.

The ePortfolio that was awarded first place is called the El Calaboz ePortfolio and was created by a WSU graduate student who is part of the Apache community. She used her My Site to present her story of mobilizing more than 70 stakeholders in a border conflict at the Mexico-United States border. “She invited people from her community to participate in her My Site, adding their real-world voice to her dissertation so it becomes a living document,” says Peterson. “Using her My Site as a hub for global interaction, she is, at the same time, in complete control of her site.”

Other examples of using the My Site feature to collaborate beyond the boundaries of a traditional classroom have started to occur within students’ normal course work. In one case, a group of student teachers set up a My Site to share their experience as student mentors in a local elementary school. They shared their materials and discussed issues, inviting the mentoring elementary school teacher to contribute to the discussion and augment the peer-review process. “We were looking for a technology tool that students can use to engage with learning beyond the classroom, and this is a perfect example,” says Peterson. “Here we saw students engaged in cross-institutional collaboration between an elementary school and the university charged with preparing future teachers.”

Encourages Self Reflection

A major goal for the ePortfolio contests was to improve the CTLT’s understanding of “ePortfolio thinking,” where students evaluate their work in progress, take risks, reach out for feedback, celebrate their successes, and face their challenges—all the while providing a vibrant, authentic representation of the iterative process of learning.

True to the self-exploratory nature of creating an ePortfolio, Waldin found herself reflecting on the learning process and working in a group when she and her teammate wrote the brainstorming and “team norming” sections of the EEG Patient Monitory System ePortfolio. “The design of the Web site helped us reflect on what we had done because we built it like a timeline that showed a progression of my understanding of my work style compared to others. I realized I was a bit naïve about expecting other people to work the way I do. Documenting the process got me reflecting on how I interact with others and how I could adjust expectations accordingly.”

Modernizes Curriculum and Improves Learning Outcomes

The second ePortfolio contest provided the CTLT with a greater understanding of how students are using their Office SharePoint Server 2007 My Site to take control of their learning and define the collaborative relationships that would augment their projects. Today, the CTLT is working with WSU faculty to integrate My Site capabilities into their courses to improve learning outcomes and provide better services to the students.

“We have some faculty development work to do because faculty members have not been trained in designing and facilitating courses that facilitate student-centered learning,” says Brown. “Office SharePoint Server 2007 will help us modernize our approach to learning at WSU by providing faculty with compelling evidence of the benefits of students taking control of their learning.”

The following are some examples of these initiatives:

• National Science Foundation project: Six institutions—WSU, University of Oregon, University of Arkansas, Colorado School of Mines, Rowan University, and the University of Nigeria—are building an ePortfolio where faculty and student teams will share the results of their work. At the current stage of the work, faculty uses the site for project management and project assessment. It is anticipated that the project assessment will move into a project portfolio as the work matures.
• Cross-institutional first-year program: The University of Idaho and WSU jointly administer a project management site that has involved the entire faculty from “core” courses at Idaho.
• Edward R. Murrow School of Communication: Graduate students created a collaboration site and used blogs and wikis to increase communications with busy faculty members who are often on the road giving lectures.
• Students have gradually evolved the site to help them connect with professional alumni working in communications, an invaluable way to connect with mentors and potential employers. “The sites offer opportunities for engaging with the university after graduation and underscores our belief that worldware such as Office SharePoint Server 2007 supports learning for life,” says Theron Desrosier, Design Consultant at CTLT.
• WSU Honors College: This college has an ePortfolio for assessing senior thesis projects. The Thesis Proposal course is also using a SharePoint class site with a blog as hub to develop thesis proposals.
• International Christian University in Japan: Ten students are developing ePortfolios as part of a joint-enrolled course with the World Civilizations course at WSU.

“Students using Office SharePoint Server 2007 will gain experience with collaboration and intellectual property management tools that will provide a personal foundation for the lifelong learning process,” concludes Peterson. “If we can provide that foundation at WSU, we will have more than accomplished our mandate to prepare our students for the road ahead.

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