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About Southwest Baptist University
Southwest Baptist University is a small private college with approximately 3000 students. The Computer and Information Sciences Department, with over 70 majors, five full-time faculty, and a national reputation for achievement and excellence, is among the strongest at Evangelical Christian colleges in the U.S.
The Challenge: Students Need to Gain Experience with Collaborative Software
- Computer Science Departments at various universities often only develop software with students in house, ill-preparing them for the real world where software is typically developed in teams with composed of geographically dispersed members.
- Students needed to gain experience in collaborative software development, there are no more "lone rangers" in software dev.
The Solution: Central Desktop's Collaboration Software Provides Hands On Experience
- Southwest Baptist partners with large software development & engineering companies around the globe
- Students in their senior year work together with the software engineers on real world software development projects
- Those companies provide the students with feedback through Central Desktop & influence students in very positive ways
- Central Desktop facilitates a virtual work environment where, in the 2008-2009 school year, students are developing software with
- Stake-holders in India and Kansas City
- A project manager in Colorado Springs, Colorado
- A team leader in Columbia, Missouri
Additional Benefits:
- "External Member Feature" allowed industry participants into the classroom, forming a powerful team with the students and professors
- Provided a central repository to store the software files produced by the students
- Allowed for version control of code
- Users were able to open all documents, anytime, anywhere, from all stakeholders & participants
- No more hunting for students' work, it's all in one place
- More robust than other classroom management software (i.e. Blackboard), with more features
- Library system tracked check-ins and check outs
- Customer support was wonderful
- It was easy to set-up and user friendly
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"For the computer and information sciences department at Southwest Baptist University, Central Desktop forms a bridge between industry and academia; an unbelievably important bridge."
- Tim DeClue, CIS Professor and Department Chair
See it in Action:
Click Thumbnail below
Southwest Baptist University uses the Checkout / Check-In feature of Central Desktop's Files & Discussions tab to create student group presentations.Southwest Baptist University uses the Central Desktop discussions as a communications channel among students and professors.Southwest Baptist University uses Central Desktop's version tracked file sharing to share files among students and professors.
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