Leading Toward Improved Collaboration
As more and more learning is adapted to the Web 2.0 environment, it becomes imperative that faculty and students have the ability to collaborate through instant file sharing in a secure environment. Faculty, staff, and students of colleges and universities are more likely to click on or choose ‘File-Save’ than to file work in a physical filing cabinet today. Processing, managing, and storing these electronic files is much less structured than filing systems of the past. There is a critical need to manage the explosion of e-mail, documents, chat, and other content. Document creation to the ultimate disposition and storage of documents in both the function of teaching and learning, as well as the administrative functions within a university setting, requires process management that will provide a secure solution. The University of Illinois Springfield (UIS) chose to purchase a Xythos product branded as eDocs to the university community, which provided a basic content management solution. The ABACUS (central guiding priorities) method of critique was used to determine the best possible solution. In this chapter, the authors will discuss how the Xythos product was chosen and how this choice impacted the pedagogy of online learning at UIS.