BP3 Think Free Online

As an instructional designer much of the daily activities includes collaborating with faculty to develop courses.  Emails, phone calls, and online meetings are exchanged almost daily.  Contracted faculty provides content and I structure the content in a way that best serves the needs of the learners.  This is a back and forth process that takes a total of 16 weeks to complete.  My normal work hours are 8am to 5pm, but the faculty that I collaborate with work on course development in between teaching classes on campus or online, and possibly an outside fulltime job if he/she is an adjunct.  With that being said being able to work on documents simultaneously makes the world of difference.  Being able to collaborate real time or with track changes makes my job easier.  Since I work with a team of designers we are always trying to come up with tools that make our jobs more efficient. We have tried Sharepoint, but not everyone we work with has it.  We have tried Google docs, which has worked well in the past, but I wanted to try a new tool.  Thus, I discovered Think Free Online, an online office/workspace environment. 

Think Free Online allows you to upload your documents so you can access them rom anywhere at anytime.  You can create a workspace where you invite others to collaborate on projects with you.  One of the elements that drew me in was the ability to be mobile- On Your Phone!

 

I quickly created a login, a very simple process. Enter my email and a password and viola you have an account. 

Once I set up my online office I uploaded two documents, again a simple and quick process. I then created a workspace with my Literature Review where I could send emails to critical friends and ask them to provide feedback and edits. 

I will be exploring the site more and will probably download the app to my phone to be able to have access to important documents.  I am not sure if I will use the site for collaboration with faculty members since I did encounter some slow loading issues. It is difficult enough to get some faculty onboard with web 2.0 tools so introducing one that is slow doesn’t help my cause much.  I think I might pilot the site with some of the IDs on my team first and see how that goes first.