Collaborating Without Email?

The NMC's listserv for our members, the NMCTAB, is frequently rated high in our surveys as a valuable service... but we are sure no one would mind getting information in fewer email messages. One effort we have been taking to better organize the discussions is to provide summaries of the more active discussions posted to the NMC web site.

Often, our members are looking for specific kinds of software or practices used at other institutions. While this information can be collected from email responses it is a tedious cut and paste operation, and generates a flood of email responses.

As an experiment, we took a simple recent request for sharing kinds of ePortfolio systems in use and their effect, if any, on accreditation, and rather than asking for email response, set it up as a form in Google Apps. This is a very simple process to set up, more or less creating a blank spreadsheet, and then using the share as form options to construct questions. This generates a form that is sent by email, linked or as below, we can even embed the form in a web site. The responses are automatically saved to the Google Spreadsheet, and thus are publicly viewable (if you provide that option), and even better, the results are all agreggated in single place. For quantitative questions, the results can be easily graphed.

In this way, we are able to collect information with a single email. In less than 2 hours we collected 13 responses, and they are continuing to arrive.

Are there other ways of using our new tools to collaborate more successfully? What do you use for collaboration in your work groups (that sounds like a survey we can create in Google Docs...)