Two engineering students have created the collaborative online platform—Grouproom—where students communicate about their projects.
“There’s something satisfying about creating a platform that offers students a better project overview,” says DTU student Asger Johansen, who is currently writing his thesis.
A year ago, he and fellow student Andreas Overbeck came up with the idea of creating a collaborative platform enabling students to share knowledge, communicate and structure their project work.
The platform called Grouproom, is a type of hybrid between Dropbox, Facebook groups and a task manager system. In the five weeks the platform has been active, about 600 students have signed up, while about 75 are active users.
“The idea is that you can instantly see everything going on in the group without using a mouse or keyboard. Have new files been uploaded, who is online, and what have the others been discussing? We want to create a simple and very transparent platform devoid of confusing complex elements. It has to be completely basic,” says MedTech graduate Andreas Overbeck, who has an MSc degree in Medicine and Technology from DTU and now works as an IT project manager.
Who is online?
The idea arose when Asger Johansen returned to Denmark to complete his studies following a four-year stay in the USA. He quickly discovered how difficult it was to structure group work, as he did not know anyone.
When he met with the other students in his groups, the assignments were handed out but no one knew who was doing what. Andreas Overbeck had the same experience:
“There’s a lot of group work at DTU and if you don’t know anyone, you often end up in random groups. This translates into less than optimal study groups and chaotic assignments.”
The first step for the two engineering students was to check the market for online collaborative platforms. They soon discovered that the popular platform Podio is targeted at businesses, while Trello solely focused on project management. The next step was to carry out a questionnaire survey among DTU students to identify the challenges posed by group work.
The survey showed that 50 per cent of the students lacked overview over their projects and that they were willing to test a platform that provided the necessary transparency.
International perspective
The duo created a platform diagram in Photoshop and tested it out on the students. The past six months have been devoted to developing the platform and now marketing is in full swing.
“Right now, we’re focusing on DTU, where we are familiar with student needs. We want to know whether the product we’ve developed can meet the needs we identified in our earlier survey. Once we have fine-tuned the platform and ensured that the necessary features are in place, we expect to market the platform at other Danish universities like CBS and UCPH—and then it’s on to international universities,” says Asger Johansen.