New trends in academic assignments: less paper and more cloud

Abstract

Teamwork skills has been always an important ability required for the companies due to a part of their success is a result of that. An important consideration to achieve a good teamwork is an effective communication and coordination between the members of the project team. Therefore, it is necessary that everyone receive the important changes made in the project at the same time, and they have all the information and correct medium to carry out the changes. In this context, the arrival of collaborative software tools has facilitated the instantaneous communication and, in an ever more connected world, they have provided new insights in the way that people work.

Collaborative software tools, also known as groupware, are applications that help people to work in a common task simultaneously, while being at different places, with the aim of improve their productivity. For that, these apps contain specific functions to plan, organize and analyze task to facilitate the teamwork. There are numerous apps classified as collaboratives, but there are two apps that have gained importance in the last year: Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.

As teachers at the university level, we are aware of how important is for our student, and their future career, the acquisition of skills in these collaborative environments. In this work, we show the results obtained in implementing the software Office 365 in the 3rd year of the degree in Chemistry in the course “Chemical Engineering”. During the semester, several group tasks were requested focused on using the different programs including in Office 365.