Title: UniConnect: a hosted collaboration platform for the support of teaching and research in universities

Authors: Söhnke Grams

Addresses: University Competence Center for Collaboration Technologies and Center for Enterprise Information Research, University of Koblenz-Landau, Universitätsstraße 1, 56070, Koblenz, Germany

Abstract: Between 2003 and 2013 the number of students in Germany has risen by 29.58% (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2015). Due to a lack of resources, lecturers and funding, the active involvement of this increasing amount of students has become a difficult endeavour. The possibilities of an activating learning approach are limited due to courses with mass event characteristics and a uni-directional communication flow from the lecturer to the students. Against this backdrop, UniConnect provides a possible solution to this challenge in providing a collaboration platform based on IBM Connections, which is hosted by the University Competence Center for Collaboration Technologies (UCT). This paper describes the UniConnect platform and the initiative behind it and provides a use case for how IBM Connections can be successfully used to support teaching and research. The initiative can also be seen as a best practice example for a partnership between a university and specialised company partners in the software industry.

Keywords: collaboration; education; university; CSCW; digital workplace.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCC.2017.090202

International Journal of Cloud Computing, 2017 Vol.6 No.4, pp.363 - 369

Accepted: 07 Sep 2017
Published online: 05 Mar 2018 *

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