Introducing time management services into Virtual ...

Introducing time management services into Virtual communities and e-learning systems: a case study Trento, Italy {luigi.colazzo,andrea.molinari,nicola.villa}@unitn.it

Luigi Colazzo, Andrea Molinari, Nicola Villa Dept. Computer and Management Sciences University of Trento Abstract: Time is crucial in managing human relationships, especially when talking about communities of people: timetables govern most of our labor activities, our family rhythms, and the organization of our personal life. Strangely, time management have received a great attention in office automation software, like Project management tools, agendas, to-do lists etc, but has been totally forgot in what nowadays is the absolute dominator of human-computer interactions, i.e. social networks, and even in e-learning system. In this paper, we will present the main characteristics of services like meeting organization, shared agendas, shared calendars, task management and to-do lists services added to our virtual community platform, used in educational settings. They are not just a customization of existing similar services: the fact of being integrated and available inside the virtual community gives them many new possibilities of usage and usefulness for end-users. The scope of the virtual community and its well defined mission for participants (a classroom, a research group, a meeting, a secretariat etc) maximizes the benefits obtainable from the usage of these services inside the community with the other members. In the paper, these aspects will be presented together with the theoretical aspects related to time-based interaction among virtual communities. Some of these services will be presented in the details of their structure and in the great potential that could be expressed when used as a support to the virtual community life, like for example the task-list service, a quite sophisticated, CPM (critical path method)-compatible planner resembling project management software and used to plan, monitor and manage the activities of community members. The results of early experimentations on virtual learning communities composed by teachers, students and tutors will be illustrated

1. Introduction Managing time is one of the main problems of our daily life, and is also a problem for computers, as time is not linear (minutes, hours, days etc.). Time is even more important in managing human relationships, especially when talking about communities of people: timetables govern most of our labor activities, our family rhythms, and the organization of our personal life. Strangely, time management have received a great attention in office automation software, like Project management tools, agenda management, to-do list software

etc, but has been totally forgot in what nowadays is the absolute dominator of human-computer interactions, i.e. social networks like Facebook™, Myspace™, Twitter™ etc. We have special services devoted to time management available on the web, like services that helps to organize meetings (for example, Doodle™ or Google Calendar™), but it is particularly strange, from our perspective, that in a virtual community created using any social network, timemanagement specific services are totally absent, or are very simple agendas with trivial functionalities. Extending this observation to our research field, i.e., virtual communities [1] applied to e-learning settings, the situation is even worst. In this case the e-learning system creates, implicitly or explicitly, a plurality of virtual learning communities that constitute a virtual extension of the real communities existing within a course. Due to all the possible interactions among subjects (tutors, teachers, students, external contributors, administrative staff etc.), and due to the relevance of time management in these settings (lecture hours, office hours, timetable, calendar management, task assignments, meetings, etc), we believe that virtual communities systems should have a powerful and suitable set of services devoted specifically to manage these aspects, and most of all, these services should be tightly related and integrated with the other services provided by the platform. Of course, in a virtual community specifically devoted to e-learning, crucial services are consolidated, like file management, blogs, wikis, forums etc. Nevertheless, we are convinced that virtual communities systems should provide a more detailed treatment for the problem of managing chrono-referenced items in systems characterized by a plurality of time-bounded facts. Our research group is working since 1998 on e-learning and virtual communities systems, and have developed a platform called “Online Communities” devoted to the implementation of the concept of virtual community as originally formulated in 1993 by Howard Rheingold, i.e., “"when people carry on public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal

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relationships”. The platform implements many synchronous and asynchronous services typically used today, on one side, in environments devoted specifically to e-learning (like Moodle™), and on the other side available in social network platforms. The system is built around the metaphor of “virtual community”. The main characteristics of a community could be summed up as follows: • Each Community avails itself of a certain number of services. • The services are general applications that enable the users to communicate in synchronous and asynchronous way, to publish contents, to exchange files, to coordinate events, etc. • The potential services of a community are activated by a manager of the community according to the needs and the users of a community can use them with different rights and duties. • The communities can be aggregated into larger communities with hierarchic mechanisms and infinite nesting levels. • The communities can be aggregated in an arbitrary way into larger communities disregarding the possible position of a hierarchical structure. • All users are recognized. Therefore, the community is a container ready for didactic processes, but not only: research teams, recreation groups, friends, secretariats, board of directors, colleagues, anything that could be an aggregation of people around a scope using virtual spaces on the web. The core of the application is composed by some abstract entities, i.e., Virtual Communities as aggregation of People to which some communication services are available in order to obtain some objectives. In detail, a virtual community [2], [3], is a space on the web dedicated to a collaboration objective, populated by people who communicate among each other, using a series of communication systems. With this approach, it could be possible to represent all the hierarchical relationships between different types of community (like Faculties, Didactic Paths, Master Degrees, Courses, etc.). On Line Communities had been experienced with limited number of users since 2003, and was finally released on early 2005. As from 2005 it was used by the whole faculty of Economics of our University in all its components (students, teachers, dean, secretaries, administrative staff, external partners) and others faculties are using the system in many courses. At present the system has more than 1400 active communities, 8500 users and about 1.5 million unique accesses since November 2005. Now the system is evolving from the university’s experience to a wider lifelong learning platform, oriented to the public employees of our local government. L3 (Lifelong Learning) is a project commissioned by the Autonomous

Province of Trento (PAT) to our research team, in order to create a collaborative platform for training projects within the PAT itself and other connected public entities. The objective is therefore to provide the local government with a tool that supports all the collaborative and training activities for its employees, with a different approach respect to traditional LMSs like Moodle™, WebCt™ or Blackboard™. In this new context we are creating a series of services aimed at supporting distance learning activities, extending the possibilities of its use in time and space. The shift from an e-learning to a lifelong learning metaphor implies a higher level of implementation complexities. Given that a most detailed list of functionalities is beyond the aim of this presentation, the evolution of the platform in lifelong learning settings is keeping us fully busy in studying a series of articulated functionalities which we prefer to call “services”: • “traditional” services: asynchronous (forum, agenda, upload & download of learning objects, newsgroup, notice-board, classroom management, management of course pamphlets and of users, etc.) and synchronous ones (chat, streaming audio/video) and “Personalized” Services, closer to the aspects of life-long learning and “training on the job” (tutorship, training on demand, research tools with problem contextualization, semantic web, FAQ etc.). • Integration services with external information systems (for example, the Personnel information system of the organization) • Services for the fruition of “off-line” courses, i.e., courses already held and recorded, digitalized and made available to controlled communities of users (with the possibility to synchronize the video with slides, podcast, webcast, SCORM modules, etc.). • Services for the creation of evaluation test, quizzes, polls etc. • Statistics about the users behaviour (using an internal data warehouse enriched by activity logs) • Mobile Services to support mobile learners. There are some innovative services which meet the mobility needs of the subject who wants to learn “on the move”, performing learning/collaboration activities directly through his/her mobile device (mobile phone, PDA, tablet PC, IPod, etc.). Our approach is not the pure “classroom-based” approach of LMSs like Moodle™, nor the generalist approach of social networks like Facebook™, halfway between the traditional learning environments and the social network applications. A PCE does not accept the simple subscription; it requires you to enter into a community in order to interact with others. A PCE is not usable just for e-learning related activities: it allow you to create a community in order to manage next conference in Amman, or to collect opinions around a certain topic among some friends, or to gather parents of the association “No pain for children” in a virtual


space that allow them to discuss with doctors the problem of applying pain therapy to their kids. By the way, such a virtual space could respond simultaneously to all of these instances, but also to “simpler” issues related to educational scopes; the didactical needs and the improving of the interaction level necessary for the development of a participative environment. Online communities is therefore an alternative to both systems, better positioned (in our opinion and experience) to solve collaboration problems of people that want to be supported by ICTs.

Social Networks

Traditional LMSs On Line Communities

Figure 1: On Line Communities and the other systems

The community metaphor helps us to follow this type of approach; in fact, it is very similar to the metaphors used by the most popular social networking services, but it is also different from what is used in the traditional LMSs. Generally, the increase of the social interactions in learning is never a bad thing, so using a tool that makes social interaction so easy is surely a good experimentation. The integration between a learning space and a social space could also be positive because it reinforces the idea that learning doesn’t just happen in privileged spaces, but learning can happen anywhere and without the intervention of an “official teacher”. This allows us to integrate the learning activities in a broader context that students are interested in, because the border between “learning” and “life” isn’t so distant.

2. New approaches and new services: On Line Communities 2.0 The described approach allows us to think and create a group of new services that originally were not planned. This re-design was possible thanks to the ongoing project with the Autonomous Province of Trento. L3 (LifeLong Learning) is the evolution of Online Communities, and has been chosen as the technological infrastructure for lifelong learning projects of our public administration. The new focus is significantly different from previous ones, because it also includes non-academic organizations; this change could be a critical factor in the design and implementation for a pure e-learning platform, especially when introducing new services. Our goal is to build a number of features that

could meet the informative needs of public employees, according also to the learning needs of the students of our university: these two aspects could be, in some cases, in conflict. The reasons to follow a different way, not transforming On Line Communities in a fully social network service, may be of three types: - the use of “too social” services could be risky and not aligned with a public employee’s work obligations; - we don’t want to compete with existing and very popular services on the net (like blogging platforms); - contexts where our action is very different from that of “free” social services. Our decision was to equip the system with the typical web 2.0 tools [4][5], but adapt them to the specificity of our virtual community system[6]. In this way, the web 2.0 services can take advantage of some peculiarities supplied by the community system: • users can play different roles inside the community • permissions and roles can be specific for each service: just as examples of possible granularity, a whiteboard have a permission “scroll”, a video have the permission “listen just audio track”, a SCORM learning object the “browse” permission etc. • permissions can be specific for each community: the community “Board of Directors” does not need the permission “manage thesis” like the community of a Faculty • users can be grouped independently from community membership in work areas • Communities are organized into hierarchies and can therefore be nested • Communities can have cross-relationships with other communities independently from the hierarchy • communities can inherit users/services/permissions etc. from multiple parents • services inherit characteristics from other services • service’s main deliverable can be merged following the hierarchy of communities: for example, a blog or a wiki can be created as the aggregation of blogs/wikis of all the child communities • roles can have polymorphic behaviors • roles can be delegated to other people These specific features, included in our implementation of the concept of virtual community, allow users to manage their own learning spaces: in some way to enable the users to create a “Personal Learning Space” for their needs. The user, in other words, will have the opportunity to access to his/her personal page, which will contain personalized services. As a result, some interesting new services can be provided. Some examples: 1. access to communities where the user was registered; 2. view the most used services by each user; 3. access to contextual services for each community; 4. access to the personalized services; 5. add some services into the personal learning area.


In a Personal learning environment, mainly oriented to collaboration and activity management like what we foresee for our users, one of the most important component that users should have at their disposal, and that strangely are not available in suitable form both in LMS and in Social network platforms, is a set of services that allow the user to manage time-related objects, like events, agendas, tasks and task dependences, resources allocation, in general concepts that are very common in Project Management approaches, or even simpler, in time-tracking or “to-do list” software. Due to our background in Information Sciences and Project management, and due to the evidence of this need into a collaboration platform (even with e-learning attitudes) [7], we decided to implement this complex software component. The details are described in the following section.

3. Time management platforms

in

collaboration

Outside e-learning platforms, many tools exist to help users to manage their own activities. For example, Plan Project1 is able to manage the tasks and project of a work group, by assigning to each users things that must be executed. Online TaskList2 is a simpler tool, able to manage projects and tasks without aggregation levels. Zoho Projects3allow to manage the role that each user has inside the project, however without the possibility to follow the structure of a real WBS (Work Breakdown Structure). In the realm of e-learning, the experimentation of Project management techniques are very (and surprisingly) limited, nor the social network platforms demonstrate any interest in providing this service to the millions of users enrolled. Most of the experimentation of Project Management approaches and techniques are limited to simple, personal to-do lists management : for example, in MoodleTM 4 this kind of support can be found only with the inclusion of external plugins (like Trakpad),while another well known e-learning platform, Docebo5 presents a service of project management internal to a course, being the project made up with a set of tasks with a unique hierarchy level, thus avoiding the user to replicate a WBS or even a simple task-subtask structure. The objective of a tool that allow a general “task management” activity is to coordinate and control the development of a generic project built with the contribution of different people, with user satisfaction in the interaction with the system thanks to the obfuscation of Project management complexity, without any need of further tools or external platform. This is exactly what we wanted to provide with the service available in “Online Communities”, 1

www.planprojects.com www.onlinetasklist.com 3 projects.zoho.com/home.na 4 www.moodle.org 5 www.docebo.org 2

but giving to the user further advantages given by the hierarchical and relational structure of the communities, by the possibility of having different users with different roles and different views of the projects’ tasks and resources. It is important to note that the control on a task list reflects the structure of rules, permissions and roles of “Online Communities”. Users of the platform have, on one side, an institutional role inside the organization in which the platform is used, and on the other side a functional role for each of the communities to which they are enrolled. Examples of institutional roles are the classic ones of every academy (teacher, student, administrative staff, tutor etc.), while examples of functional roles are the administrator of the system, the administrator of a community, participant etc. The approach we followed in the construction of the task management service (Tasklist) aimed at including functionalities that are much different among each other. In this way it is possible to create: a. Personal To-Do Lists: in this case, the TaskList is not shared with any other member of the community, but acts as a personal reminder of the activities to be done in a certain period of time. Tasks can be both trial activities and complex projects. b. Brainstorming: the TaskList can be used as a support to brainstorming activities done by people that have no chance to meet neither face-to-face, nor through the usage of videoconferencing equipment. In fact, the possibility of adding files to tasks allows every user to add her opinion. c. Meeting arrangement: the invitation and the documents can be sent to participants through the use of a task called, for example, “Meeting”. Afterwards, the participants can attach their own feedback or other materials. d. Project planning, execution and monitoring: it is possible to create and then redefine the structure of the task gradually. It is possible to assign the responsibilities to users and subsequently to change them. Being an attribute “completed” associated to every task, indicating that the task is concluded or not, this will be used to indicate the level of completion of every task and subtask of the project. To every task of the project different files indicating the guidelines for the completion of the activity can be associated, or including final reports or other contents. The project manager or responsible of the project / task thus has the possibility of monitoring its progress e. Bulletin-Board System: TaskList can be used as a simple Bulletin-Board System, i.e., a virtual place shared by different users, where it is possible to share files and exchange messages


The short list just presented is not a complete analysis of all the possible scenarios in which the task list and its services can be used. As can be noticed, the list is just a set of different application scenarios where the activity management is of complete different but rigid structure. Furthermore, it is possible to notice that the examples previously explained can be very simply transformed from one to another. For example, a personal To-Do List can be transformed very easily in a Brainstorming. This happens simply by assigning some users to a certain task followed by the upload of some files.

4. Time management Communities systems

in

Virtual

The paper presents a set of new services that greatly extends the possibility of using a virtual community like a real tool for increasing productivity and efficiency of humancomputer interaction, i.e., time-management services. In this paper, we will present the main characteristics of services like meeting organization, shared agendas, shared calendars, task management and to-do lists services. These services are not just a customization of existing similar services: the fact of being integrated and available inside the virtual community gives them an interesting increase of chances of usage and usefulness for end-users. In fact, the scope of the virtual community and its well defined mission for participants (a classroom, a research group, a meeting, a secretariat etc) maximizes the benefits obtainable from the usage of these services inside the community with the other members. In the paper, these aspects will be presented together with the theoretical aspects related to time-based interaction among virtual communities. Some of these services will be presented in the details of their structure and in the great potential that could be expressed when used as a support to the virtual community life, like for example the task-list service, a quite sophisticated, CPM (critical path method)compatible planner resembling project management software and used to plan, monitor and manage the activities of community members. The results of early experimentations on virtual learning communities composed by teachers, students and tutors will be illustrated. Since 2007 we started the testing phase of Online Communities platform for the lifelong experiences of Autonomous Province of Trento (P.A.T.), the local government of our region. This experience enabled us to analyze the needs of participants in various courses and has been a guideline in the design and development of potential new services for collaborative activities. During the development of the new lifelong learning platform collaborative services have been introduced; the

aim of these type of services is to “force” the users to collaborate rather than simply upload various types of documents asynchronously. The service of this work seems appropriate to participants in training courses provided by educational institutions, certainly not classifiable as a Web 2.0 service, but following the logic that has always characterized the approach to our platform it’s a service that fits well with typical management logics of information systems and ICT collaboration support tools. The service allows a user to manage and coordinate more or less complex projects in terms of timing and resources involved. It includes functionalities able to keep the users aligned in the general development of a project, serving as a sort of reminder and summary for all participants; it also includes files archiving feature, to enable the sharing of material inside the platform. The new service for the activities management, intended as a tool for Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW), ranked somewhere between a project management tool and a simple personal tasklist service. This approach also allows us, outside the normal scope of e-learning, to manage a variety of situations, especially linked to a workplace and university. The topics related to Computer Supported Collaborative Work [8], [9], [10] have been widely discussed in the past, also regarding Project management. Applications and tools that support cooperative work are called groupware o cooperative technologies, and have been experimented since the early years of networks and multimedia [11]. One of the branches of this approach concentrates on training, and specifically on e-learning: in this case the label is Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) [26]. The need of many academic (but not only) courses and training paths, especially in technology-related disciplines, to organize the teaching activities according to learning by doing, learning by project, etc. force LMS to include groupware technologies. In the implementation of our system, we tried to help each participant of the community to plan the tasks to be done inside the community itself, in order to supply both a supporting tool and a visible situation of the state of the tasks progress, together with collaboration with other people involved in tasks / projects. The service allows managing and coordinating projects of different level of complexity, in terms of time management and resource management. It provides a tool with which to keep aligned the effort of different persons inside and outside the community, and inside or outside the system “Online Communities”, as it is possible to invite external people to the project. Together with the tasks, and following the approach of the community as a repository of shared files, tasks can be associated with files related with the task itself, thus providing basic functionalities of a Document Management System (DMS) related with a Project Management tool.


5. The implementation: some considerations and choices made One of the implementation choices that we had to do regarded the approach to projects and relative tasks. Projects have, by definition, an arbitrarily deep tree structure, in which nodes and leaves are built by the activities themselves. Wanting to use the same approach both for the creation of complex projects and for the simple to-do lists, we decided to consider the main project as a normal activity at level zero, indicating it as the root of the project tree, distinguishing it from the others just for the absence of a parent activity. Activities and projects have the same properties and the same mechanisms. All the considerations done on tasks will apply to projects. This allows to create projects composed just by one activity (represented by the project itself) in order to have simple reminders (ex. “buy the milk, go and take the boy from school, etc.”), but with all the functional potential of more complex projects (adding deadlines, assigning resources etc.). This approach is more efficient and practical, opening the Tasklist service to more trivial than Project Management techniques, increasing its utility also in simpler and daily situations. In order to manage the above cited structure, we decided to implement a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), typical instrument from Project Management theories used for the analytical decomposition of a project in different levels of details. Every activity has a numeric index, determining the level of depth in the WBS. Every activity or project has some time-bounded constraints and deadlines. A task has the following characteristics: • State: indicates in which state of development the task is. The following task states are available: a) active (the task is running), not active (the task has not been started), suspended or completed. • Priority: low, medium, high. It is a mild indicator of the urgency of running the task. • Temporal constraints: a task has three dates that determine the lifecycle: start date, end date, deadline (maximum limit to complete the task). In order to allow the creation of milestones (used to indicate, for example, the reaching of an objective of the project), we allowed these three dates to coincide. • % of completion • Category: allows the subdivision of the projects depending on the value of this field • Description; • Material: it is possible to assign some files to each task. A user with the needed permissions inside the community is able to create a new project with arbitrary number of subtasks to which it is possible to assign users with different

roles. The roles that we supported at the moment are the following • Project owner: role assigned during creation of the project. The owner has total control on the project, and has no limitation respect to role assignment, activities and project deletion, document assignment etc. • Manager: will have the same permissions of the project owner, with some limitations concerning activities created by other managers. A manager can delegate her role to other managers or simple resources. This delegation can be done only on those activities where she is the owner, i.e., creator. Same approach for the deletion and update of tasks. Notice that the project owner is different respect to all the other roles exactly for the total control on every single component of the tasklist, regardless assignments or ownership. The task of the manager and owner will be also to indicate the state of the task of the project, thus introducing the control on the work of other resources. • Resources, or executants of the project: these will have a subset of possible actions, as the main scope is to execute the task and to inform the manager • Guest: this role is conceived for those users to which we want to allow to see the project, without any possibility of interacting with it

Figure 2: The structure of a project In “Online Communities” it is possible to define three different types of tasklist, depending on the privacy and of the context. It is possible to create public and personal project inside the community, or personal projects available at portal level, i.e., outside any specific community.


•

Figure 4 Gantt chart of the activities of a project inside one virtual community, with completion percentage

6. Conclusions Figure 3. Projects and tasks where the user is involved, with the percentage of completeness

A personal tasklist is visible only to its creator or to the persons that have been assigned to it. Community’s teachers and administrators will completely ignore it, in order to guarantee the privacy of the user and her work. A public project, instead, supplies the needed authorizations thus allowing users with appropriate administrative permissions to see the project created in a certain community, interact with it and leave feedbacks. In any case, assignment and visibility must stay aligned with rules set for the whole site, i.e., just users of one community can see/use objects created inside the community: when a manager decides to add a resource to the project, the user will be asked to choose the potential resources from an already-filtered list for that project. In this way, we obtain a greater flexibility in the case of a portal tasklist, conceptually assignable to a "super-community", in which all the users enrolled to the platform (the top-level of the communities’ hierarchy) are considered inside the same container. This fact allows us to involve all the people enrolled in the platform in a unique project, independently of the community they are enrolled in. Inside the service, tasks and projects are divided into logical areas represented by three different sections: • Assigned tasks: here we have all the activities that involve the user and that are in execution • Running projects: the projects in which the user is involved • Tasks and projects management: this screen allows showing all the activities and projects in which the user has the role of manager.

The paper presented our experience in the design and implementation of some services related with time and project management inside a virtual community’s platform used for e-learning purposes. We particularly wanted to discuss how the project and task management inside a webbased collaboration environment shows some constraints and some issues that must be governed carefully. In our case, the platform named “Online Communities” assigns participants a combination of roles-permissions which allows administering security, privacy and confidentiality of the activities carried out by the users. The platform provides rigid mechanisms to manage data and relationships among participants, thus avoiding the risks of “forced friendship” typical of social networks. In this way, we avoid that services typically oriented to web 2.0 approaches, or collaborative services like task management spread data and information without the control of the owner.

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