look at the specific examples.
Example 1: Connecting With Distance
Learning Students
The Problem
A large university is faced with improving its connection
with the fast-growing segment of online students. In an
effort to improve that connection, the university is look-
ing to offer similar services that are currently available
to on-campus students. One particular example is the
English Department's initiative to offer writing assis-
tance services.
Currently, on-campus students have two options for
receiving feedback on their writing assignments. They
have the ability to walk into the English Department
offices to work with a tutor one-on-one to ask specific
questions, or they may e-mail their paper in and
receive written feedback within 48 hours.
The Solution
To provide a similar experience for the online students
who hail from all 50 states and more than 70 countries
across the globe, we worked with the university to put
a SharePoint-based solution in place that leverages
content types.
We built a single document library to hold all requests
for writing assistance. These requests come in two fla-
vors:
1. One-on-one tutoring
2. Entire paper reviews
These two requests were mapped to two different con-
tent types. The "one-on-one tutoring" type uses a sep-
arate set of metadata and workflow from the "entire
paper review" type. For "one-on-one tutoring," the
student must provide the method of communication
that they would like to leverage (instant messaging,
video conference, and so forth) and when they would
like to schedule a time to meet.
On the other hand, for "entire paper review," the stu-
dent must submit the actual paper, a description of the
writing assignment, and when they would like to have
the paper returned. Beyond different metadata, the
workflow is also different; "one-on-one tutoring"
assignments are scheduled directly with a tutor and
routed to the selected tutor, while "entire paper
review" requests are routed to a central administrator
who can assign the papers based on tutor availability
and specialty.
With the differences between the two types of
requests, why wouldn't we just create two different
libraries? Beyond the differences, these requests do
have a lot in common. Regardless of type, the requests
contain much of the same information (class, professor,
degree program, reason the student is using the serv-
ice, and so on) and are serviced by tutors regardless of
type.
Taking It to the Next Level
Now, with a library that captures the tutoring requests,
data retention policies can be defined to ensure old
papers are deleted after the student graduates. In
addition, the information that is captured as part of the
tutoring process can be leveraged in future tutoring
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Putting SharePoint to Work for You, an Internet.com Developer eBook. Copyright 2008, Jupitermedia Corp.
Putting SharePoint to Work for You
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Figure 6: Request live assistance.