[Techtaffy Newsdesk]

IBM is helping students at York University’s Schulich School of Business develop leadership skills by learning to collaborate on course work virtually in the cloud.

In the fall of 2011, 400 students enrolled in “Management 1000” at the Schulich School of Business used IBM’s social networking services to aid their semester-long project of creating a comprehensive business plan. Students at Schulich used the IBM SmartCloud for Social Business portfolio for online meetings, file sharing, decision making, workload sharing and overall project management.

“The students were already familiar with consumer social networking sites, but this project exposed them to how people communicate and collaborate in a real-world business setting,” says Jean Adams, Professor, Schulich School of Business, York University.

Online meetings were used frequently since many of the students lived off campus and far apart. IBM SmartCloud for Social Business helped the students to get to know each other so that they could effectively collaborate to develop and complete their business plan projects.

Students used the social networking capabilities in IBM SmartCloud to share, track and vote on new business ideas. In addition, students worked in teams to create online communities, share files, set up activities, create action items, monitor project timelines, assign tasks and deadlines, and participate in meetings arranged by each team’s designated technical expert.

Using the IBM tool, instead of a consumer social networking service such as Facebook, allowed the students to collaborate in a confidential and more structured, business-like manner.

The Schulich School of Business is the top-rated business school in Canada and ranked among the top business schools in the world by the Economist magazine. Schulich is also ranked as one of the globe’s top 10 schools outside the U.S. by Bloomberg Businessweek and Forbes.

Upload: 02-05-12