Running head: FINAL PROJECT 1

Final Project
Ben Sunderman
Siena Heights University
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Final Project

In many classes, there is an expectation of group work. Many professors assign a group

project and then leave the coordination and communication of the group up to the assigned group

members. Some professors, however, might not be comfortable making the students handle this

on their own and want to set up an organized chat platform for the groups. In one college

classroom, this was the case. The professor did not feel comfortable leaving the students

unsupported in their communication strategy and wanted to find a communication platform that

could work with his other classroom aspects. The main assignment for the class was a group

presentation on a case study the students worked up. There were five groups and each group got

a different company and had to do research about the company and give a report on what the

company should do next using corporate strategic management principles.

The professor knew that the college had a requirement of a laptop in order to be in

attendance to the business program at his school and as such, sought out a online communication

platform to use in his class for the group assignments. The professor happened to do some

research into discord.com and found that this was a free communication platform. He pursued

further into the platform, creating his free account and creating a server in discord specific to his

class about business and strategic management.

Discord (discord.com) is a group communication platform that spreads text and voice

communication over a variety of channels that should have a topic and focus. These channels can

be sorted into categories and each channel or category can be set to only be viewed if the user

has been given a set role. By using all these features, there can be a general category the entire

class would be able to see and talk in. There also could be separate categories that are named for

the companies each group is researching. By creating a role for each company, a user can be
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given a role for company A and only users that have the company A role can see the

communication about the research and presentation being made. All these features are drag and

drop, or simple setting management tasks. The only piece that would take extra knowledge is the

formatting to bold, italicize, or underline a string of text. These involve a series of underscores or

asterisks before and after the text to tell discord to bold, italicize, or underline text.

Having this knowledge of how discord works, and there are tutorials on their website, the

professor would be able to go through the basic steps to create 5 roles, each role named for the

company a group would be expected to research. Once the roles were created, the professor

would then create the categories for each group. Once the categories are created and the settings

are managed to where only users with the specific company role can view the channels in that

category, the professor would then add chat channels to each category. The chat channels will

hold the same permissions for viewing as the category they are set under. After this, he would

want to create general class channels where he could address questions. Additionally, he would

want to add one voice channel with permissions for video streaming. This enabled the

presentations to be done over discord, assuming that is needed for the class. Once all this server

set up is complete, the professor would give out an invite link to the students in his class to join

the server. The professor would have to add roles to each student manually, but once this one

time set up is complete, it will not have to be done again.

Once the students are in the class server, they can begin working on their project. All they

will need to do is contact the professor if they want to new chat channel added for a specific

topic and the professor could quickly accomplish that. The professor would also be able to

manage the chat to see if every student is participating equally.

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One limitation to using discord for class work in this manner is that discord does not have

a great platform for file management. There could be a text channel devoted to files, but it is

likely that this would get too cluttered to be useful. Instead, using a different service like Google

docs would be more beneficial, but would add to the number of online services a student is using

for one class. One advantage is that each chat channel would have one devoted topic, so the

group could have a channel specific to marketing efforts, while a second chat channel focuses on

the finances of the company. A second advantage is that each group could be given its own

personal voice channel. This means that the group could go into their own private call about their

group work and by having it be through discord, they can share screens and utilize the

information they put in discord easily and quickly.

I would give this platform an eight out of ten for its usefulness in the classroom. It is easy

to have team-based communications through discord, but manipulating files and collaborating is

not its strong suit. The platform has many strong elements regarding how it manages

communication. The main limiting factor is how it manages files. As this is not its intended use, I

find it hard to say that discord fails to be useful, but it is only useful regarding the team

communication piece of group work. Good collaborative tools that work well with this

communication tool is Google docs or Microsoft Onedrive. Discord has a main strength of

organizing and managing communications. I would and actively use this platform in my

professional and personal life for communications when it comes to a team. I have a server

created for the Siena Heights Esports team and I have a server created for family to chat and

hang out in. There are many versatile uses for discord, but at its core basic, there are chat

channels that one can type into, voice channels one can speak into, and roles that one can use to

manage who can see what channels.