University of Oklahoma

The challenge

Moving the university experience online

The responsibilities of a university professor extend far beyond the lecture hall. Professors collaborate with graduate students, teaching assistants and other faculty members on planning curricula, leading research projects and even writing books. With so many moving parts to keep track of, academic teams often end up with a gigantic paper trail of coursework, reports and data.

When the tidal wave of changes from the pandemic rushed onto university campuses in the spring of 2020, faculties and students worldwide had to quickly pack their bags, clear their rooms and offices and head home. All University of Oklahoma (OU) faculty members were required to work and teach remotely. If psychology professor Jenel Cavazos, Ph.D., hadn’t set up her lessons and processes with Trello and Dropbox, her research projects, course curricula and plans for the semester would have been locked up on her physical desktop or external hard drive. 

As the school year went on, classes fewer than 40 students could return in person while larger classes remained either fully or partially remote. Being in the classroom has its benefits for the students, but this hybrid model only created more organisational challenges for the faculty.

The solution

A new school of thought

When the start of COVID-19 pandemic uprooted everyone from their campuses in the spring semester of 2020, professors and graduate students at OU were able to adapt more easily thanks to education technology and cloud-based collaboration tools, including web-based applications like Trello and Dropbox. The two digital collaboration tools integrate, allowing users to reliably store and share their files while providing secure access to proprietary information and data.

Trello, a visual collaboration platform that organises your projects into boards, works like a digital whiteboard with sticky notes, where each sticky note represents a task. It lets you know what your students and colleagues are working on, who’s assigned to which projects and the progress they are making.

Dr. Cavazos created a Trello board for each course she taught and collaborated on with her graduate students. A Trello board is a combination of an information repository and a project tracker. She communicated and collaborated with her graduate students in Trello cards on the board to assign tasks, captured ideas, checked-in on course progress and provided feedback and opportunities for improvement.

The Dropbox Power-Up in Trello made it seamless for Dr. Cavazos and anyone on her team to access and collaborate on curriculum details, checklists and reports whenever they needed them. Any updates made to the Trello boards were also shown in the Dropbox file activity feed.

As the academic year progressed, Dr. Cavazos also used Dropbox Paper to help her stay organised. When dealing with large research and planning documents, she found that “the ability to minimise entire huge portions of text using headlines”, a feature included in Paper, was so “convenient”. Instead of searching through pages and pages of text to find what she was looking for, she could click on the headline to maximise the section of information she needed.