GoogleApps@RMIT Case Study - Working collaboratively between Google Docs and Microsoft Word
Where in the University?
College of Science, Engineering and Health Academic Development Group supports staff within the college to adopt Educational Technology effectively and assists with Learning Design activities and Program related matters.
The situation
The Academic Development Group works with Academic staff and schools on a variety of issues including teaching and learning and governance related. Most of these activities require a template to be filled in and edited by us in the ADG as well as academic and support staff in the schools (eg: PAR, Paperwork for ADC). This example discusses one such activity - development of a Learning Guide. A Learning Guide for a course is developed with the Educational Developers at the ADG and teaching academic staff, based on a template. This is to guide the students through their learning activities.
At the moment, these are typed in Word and emailed back and forth between the Educational Developer and the Academic staff. Tracking changes is one of the problems; Sometimes colors are used to indicate the changes and other times track changes in Word is used. If both could collaboratively work on the same document and discuss the changes, it could be resolved quickly rather than through multiple emails. This is not feasible within the current setup.
Google Doc has limitations in terms of some functionality that Office offers such as complex tables, conditional text and complex equations or macro based functionalities.
The solution
The original document is created in Word and sync’ed to Google Cloud. This is then shared with the selected collaborators. Once the collaborators open the same document they will retain a Word doc in their storage in the local systems as well as in the Cloud. When they save their documents, the documents are sync’ed to the cloud and with other online collaborators. If they are off-line when they open the document, system will prompt and sync to the latest version. The revisions are kept allowing for swapping to earlier revisions which is not possible within word document tracking system unless the academics keeps private revisions tracking system with naming and creating different files with changes.
Benefits
Allows for productivity and efficiency. Instant chatting while working on the documents using commenting allows for good collaboration. No loss of information. Cloud Connect is allowing the benefits of using Google Docs - anywhere, anytime, online storage and real time collaboration, but without compromising document quality for official RMIT documentation requiring rich editing.
User experience
Very limited trial showed good potential for using it. However there factors people using it must be aware of before they start using it. For example the edits must be in different colors so that they are instantly visible. Using comments to communicate or use Google Chat to communicate while simultaneously editing them. If they are being edited asynchronously then the system works best. I would rate the experience as GOOD.
Further tool integration
In this instance we are using Microsoft Office 2010 in XP/Win7 platforms with 32/64 bits operating systems and through wired and wireless networking.
The future
My belief is that this is very scalable and very useful for majority of RMIT staff who work on Microsoft Office products for collaborated outputs.
Supporting websites/sources
Google Cloud Connect download and videos on how to use them
Author:
Save Date: 10/12/2008
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