Collaborating with Group Members

There are several collaborative tools available for your group to use while drafting your report. There are two main things to consider when working with others:

How and when are you going to communicate as a group?
What role and/or responsibilities will each team member have in this assignment?

Communication

Asynchronous

Canvas Groups

Within Groups, you can:

View the group list
Start a discussion
Send a message
Create group collaborations
- Canvas features a Collaborations section on the left-side navigation tab where you can access Google Docs related to this course. This option requires that all of your group members have a Gmail account. To learn more, read this Canvas support article: What are Collaborations?

To access groups, click on People in the near-left navigation tab, then click on the "Groups" tab.

Learn more about Groups by watching this video: Group Creation and Interaction for Students (Video).

Microsoft OneDrive

As an OU student, you have access to the Office 365 suite of products. One of those products is Microsoft OneDrive, which allows you to co-author documents in real-time.

To access OneDrive, go to onedrive.com and sign in using your OU email address and OU password.

Learn more about how OneDrive works by reading this Microsoft Support article: Collaborate on Word documents with real-time co-authoring.

Synchronous

Microsoft Teams

Another product that OU students have access to with Office 365 is Microsoft Teams, a synchronous/asynchronous communication platform. Teams offers workspace and videoconferencing, file storage, and application integration. Here are some of the features:

Chat: includes group chats and file sharing
Teams: allows the user to set up a team for classes
Channels: allows the user to set up a channel within a team (similar to Slack)
Calling: including instant messaging, video conferencing, phone-in options, meeting link connection
Meetings: including Outlook integration, broadcasting live events, attendance reports

You may find the following tutorials helpful:

Get Started with Microsoft Teams: 5 things to do first
Microsoft Teams Tutorial in 10 Minutes
Top 20 Microsoft Team Tips and Tricks

Zoom and MyMedia Kaltura

OU students have access to a pro Zoom account, which allows you to communicate in real-time.

To access Zoom, visit oklahoma.zoom.us and sign in using your OU email and password.

Recording Zoom Meetings: Recording your meeting may be helpful to refer to the discussion later or share with a group member who could not attend. To record your meeting, check the Zoom settings in your account. You should record your video "to the cloud." This will send the recording of your meeting to MyMedia Kaltura, a video repository similar to YouTube. Before you make your first recording, you will need to log into mymedia.ou.edu. Use your OU email and password to log in. Once you log in, your Zoom recordings should go here by default. Note that it may take some time for a recording to transfer from Zoom to MyMedia.

Sharing MyMedia Recordings: After you have recorded your meeting, log in to mymedia.ou.edu to share the recording. Click on your name at the top of the page and select "My Media" from the dropdown list. You should see the recording of your meeting in the list of videos. Click on the particular video that you would like to share. For others to access your recording, you will need to publish the recording as "unlisted." Under the transcript of your meeting, find the "Actions" tab and click on the downward arrow to get the dropdown list. Select "publish" and then change the setting from "private" to "unlisted." Make sure that you click save at the bottom of the page. Now go to the "share" tab beneath the video and copy the link to the media page.

Other Synchronous Options

If your group is more familiar with FaceTime, Slack, Discord, or Skype, you can use one of those options instead.