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17 online

17 Online Business Development Tools That Will Transform Your Business

Once you become clear about your magnetic brand message, the next step is to position and promote your brand and educate others on the value of your unique promise of value.
There are tons of great online tools to help you promote your brand online and even more exciting is the fact that many of them are free or moderately priced.
In this special report I share with you 17 powerful tools that have helped to transform my business by providing an outlet for powerful brand promotion.

FREE Branding Survey

Can you describe your "unique promise of value" in less than 30 seconds? If not, you are among many professionals and entrepreneurs who are not leveraging the power of your magnetic brand to accelerate your personal and professional success.

You must be able to clearly explain your value to your employer, clients and those around you for them to truly understand, appreciate and compensate you for your "unique promise of value."

17 Online Meeting Tools That Facilitate Collaboration

Online conferencing tools are used for many reasons – sales presentations, webinars and training, to name a few. Plus, if you work from home, like many freelancers and small business owners do, you face the unique challenge of needing live meeting time with clients who may be located around the world.

There are many online meeting tools out there that offer a variety of features at varying costs. Here are a few tools you may want to consider, some of their notable features and the cost for using them.

17 online 'student common rooms

The following issues are likely to be familiar to anyone working within higher education:

1. Information and resources: Students receive a lot of information, both during induction and throughout their course. Given that this information is typically disseminated via different formats and in multiple places (e.g. paper-based and online across many websites), it is unsurprising that students often loose or forget about it.  Also,there are many resources available to students, but they are often unaware that they exist or where to find them.
2. Online learning: Students can be less than enthusiastic to engage with a university's virtual learning environment (VLE).
3. Communication and feedback: Communication amongst and between both staff and students can sometimes be problematic, as can the process of gaining feedback from students about their courses.
4. Lecturers involved in online learning: Lecturers do not necessarily have time to research the latest e-learning technologies and pedagogies. 
5. Link between what is being taught, latest academic research and current news: By the time students have had their induction at university they are (hopefully!) aware of the idea that their subject is relevant to real life and that it is continuously changing.  However, given that this is not something that is necessarily stressed before they come to university, they often do not realise its importance and how this actually applies in practice.

17 online 'student common rooms'

The School of Social, Historical and Literary Studies (SSHLS) is one of the largest schools in the University of Portsmouth. One way in which the School is attempting to address the issues above is through a School-wide project to design, create and run online what we have termed 'Student Common Rooms' (SCRs).

An online Student Common Room (SCR) was setup for each of the five subject areas within SSHLS: Sociology, History, English, Journalism and Politics. A screen shot of the home page of the Sociology SCR is shown in Figure 1. Each SCR acts as a 'gateway' or 'portal' giving students a single starting point from which they can access:

* Timetables
* Grades
* Assessment deadlines
* Maps and staff telephone numbers
* Student rep details
* Links to the University library website
* SSHLS hand book
* Careers resources and guidance
* Tools for submitting work and receiving  feedback
* Coursework receipts
* Term and semester dates
* Attendance guidelines
* Study skills resources
* Reading lists
* Options lists
* Dissertation and research management resources
* Live RSS news feeds (relevant news stories, videos, podcasts and the latest academic research in their subject area)
* An area to leave feedback about any aspect of their course
* An area where discussions can take place between students or between students and staff

It is easy to see how the SCRs can address the issue of students accessing resources and information (issue 1 above). However, whether or not they address the other issues depends on how the system is designed.

 The idea of using 'gateway' or 'portal' type websites is not new. However, the key issue here is how the SCRs are updated and maintained.  There are two typical situations. First, the control and maintenance of the content can be the responsibility of the online development or administrative team. However, this situation does not encourage lecturers to engage with the technology (issue 4 above). The alternative is that lecturers control and develop the content. However, this can lead to inconsistencies arising across a school or faculty in relation to how (or if!) the content is maintained.

What is needed is a an online system in which lecturers have some input to maintaining and developing the content, but where the system is created and run in a way that ensures the information is updated regularly and correctly. This is what the SCRs aim to achieve. The remainder of this article focuses on the practical implementation and design decisions that are critical to the success of the system.

System design, implementation and maintenance
There are two main groups of end-users: the students themselves and the lecturers updating the system. All design decisions therefore needed to take account of the needs of each group.The first decision to be made was the choice of platform. A basic requirement was that the platform was institutionally supported. With this requirement in mind, there were two main choices available:

* Blackboard, the University's virtual learning environment (VLE) (rebranded as 'Victory' at the University of Portsmouth).
* Terminal Four, the University website's content management system (CMS) that runs the main University website.

Terminal Four was discounted as the main delivery platform for a number of reasons:

* Web pages generated from Terminal Four are not password protected and so not suitable for some information.
* It does not provide communications tools, such as discussion boards, and thus does not address the communication issue (number 3 above).
* Lecturers are not trained to use it.
* The University's central web team hold overall control over the content within Terminal Four, which means that it is not flexible enough for the School's online development team.
* Using Terminal Four as the platform would not encourage students to login to Blackboard (Victory) (i.e. issue 2 above).

lackboard was therefore chosen as the delivery platform for the SCRs. While using Blackboard does overcome the above mentioned problems with Terminal Four, it introduces a few of its own. The biggest of these is the duplication of information: i.e. if 5 SCRs are required, then this it could mean that the same information must be added to each of the 5 sites. [1].  This is clearly not sensible, so a hybrid system was designed. 
To access their SCR, students login to Blackboard and click on the link to their SCR that appears alongside the units that they are studying.  (Each unit that the student is studying still has its own area in Blackboard, for example containing lecture notes and other unit-specific materials, which is separate from their SCR and maintained by the unit coordinator). Once inside the SCR, students can browse to find all of the information they need. In order to address the information duplication problem above, much information relevant to multiple courses is stored outside Blackboard and simply linked from each SCR. 
All 5 SCRs have the same design and structure (figure 1). This is important for several reasons: first, combined honours students have access to more than one site so it's helpful if sites are consistent; second, it is very time consuming and impractical to write separate instructions (for both lecturers and students) for each subject area.
For each SCR the following design principles and updating responsibilities apply:

* Generic information common to all students in the University: each SCR provides links out to all of the generic information and resources, e.g. term dates, the library, grades and time tables, e-mail system, central student services etc.
* Generic information common to all students in SSHLS (e.g. the SSHLS handbook) is stored on the University website and linked from Blackboard. This ensures that we only need to update one copy of the information. This is the responsibility of the development team and the Associate Head to maintain.
* Information specific to each subject area is the responsibility of each subject area leader. This task is delegated to a lecturer from that subject area.  This includes reading lists, staff roles and specialisms, assessment deadlines, unit options lists, student rep details, online student feedback, degree handbooks.  The same staff are also responsible for monitoring the discussion boards.