Unit 3: Studying and working groups

What other tools help with group work?

In order to work well together, you also need suitable tools. These are available at the University of Jena and we would like to show you how you can use them well.

The Friedrich Schiller University of Jena has set up a cloud for its students and staff to work together on assignments or study groups. This cloud is a way to securely store and edit your documents and files. OnlyOffice, a programme for online editing of documents, works on the cloud. There you can work on documents together at the same time, comment on them and much more. To do this, log in to the cloud.uni-jena.de site with your URZ login ID and password and go to "Files" at the top of the bar. Alternatively, the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena offers all students access to the Office 365 package to install Word and Excel free of charge.

The cloud of the University of Jena is very extensive. Another function that is good for group work is the Deck. You can also use this to organize the work in the group according to the Kanban principle and to distribute tasks and topics. This can be done, for example, according to the basic principle "collect tasks - distribute tasks - complete tasks". Take a look at the tutorial for using the Cloud Deck at the University of Jena.

Zoom is also a good tool for group work. You will also find a tutorial on how to use it in this module.

Another new tool for group work is Mahara. There you can find other students who are interested in similar topics and form groups, e.g. for joint projects or homework. Mahara is also a personal learning environment for documenting learning processes and acquired knowledge with the help of portfolios. There are also already existing interest groups for writing communities, tandems and also for exchanges on the topics of the Digital Learning Kit.