I coordinate and teach an experientially-oriented venture creation course in a 20-week semester comprising of 12 student teams. During the semester, I require 6 documents from each team. Generally speaking, these documents (essentially, 5 progress reports and a final business plan) are evenly spaced throughout the semester. While there's a staff of adjuncts that coaches the teams, I'm the one responsible for outcomes, and ideally I'd like to impose this number of document deadlines.
I am looking for a website -- some kind of instructional service (something like Engrade.com?) -- that does the following:
(1) Allows me to establish an electronic deadline for group documents
(2) Allows students on a team to collaborate and then upload a group document
(3) Makes my downloading of student team progress reports as seamless as possible
(4) Sends an automated email to a specific team if that team does not upload a progress report on time.
(5) Allows me to comment within the document, and hand the marked-up version back to a team.
Currently, I'm using Blackboard, and I find Blackboard to be terribly ineffective for all of these most-basic-of-team-document-management steps:
For (1), as far as I know, Blackboard really only allows electronic deadlines for individual assignments.
For (2), as far as I know, besides "File Exchange," Blackboard also has no document collaboration capability, and I'm not interested in introducing something like Google Docs into the mix.
For (3), Blackboard also has no zip-file download of files uploaded to all groups' File Exchange folders. It only has a zip-file download for individual assignments.
For (4), as far as I know, Blackboard has no capabilities to send automated emails to students if they miss a deadline, much less to say the capability to send such emails to specific groups (i.e. teams).
For (5), as far as I know, Blackboard has no such capabilities, aside from the instructor designating him/herself as a student group member, with the ability to tediously upload/download from File Exchange folders.
Of course, an obvious way to avoid some of my troubles (#4 especially) would be to impose a strict penalty rule for tardy progress reports. However, as other instructors of such entrepreneurship experiential courses might attest, sometimes entrepreneurship-oriented team plans fall through, and a Progress Report is better submitted "late" than on time.
I'm willing to bet that there are others that have wrestled with these types of entrepreneurship-team-document-management issues. It'd be great to hear what some of you are doing (besides eliminating the requirement of progress reports)!
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dr. Chihmao Hsieh, Assistant Professor
ACE/ASE at University of Amsterdam
E2.39, Roetersstraat 11, 1018 WB Amsterdam
www1.fee.uva.nl/pp/CHsieh/
+31 20 525 4789 (office); +1 734-274-5886 (toll-free from USA)
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