IDEAS

NUS students can now build their own virtual communities within the Integrated Virtual Learning Environment (IVLE). In their own ‘community’, owners can invite members to post announcements, participate in the online and offline discussion forums, upload files and also provide relevant links to interesting websites. In short, it is an online meeting place for students to discuss, share ideas and get to know each other in cyberspace.

To date there are over one thousand communities created in IVLE, with more than two thousand users.

Future improvements to 'My Community' would include the ability to set up webpages for the community; possibly a web-log and allowing faculty (when invited by students) to participate in the students community.

Here, two students speak on why they use My Community, and how they find it useful.

Zhou Meiting, 2nd year student, School of Computing

"My Community provides pretty good facilities for me to communicate with my projects’ mates. We can chat, share files, provide links to certain project sites, and I can also send a mass announcement to the members easily.

The members can also leave messages for everyone else on the forum for further discussions. I've used this service for many of my major project discussions with my group mates.

My Community is very useful. Personally I liked it very much. But I think it's a pity most NUS students still aren't comfortable with it yet. When I told my group mates about this service, they were not sure how to use it, protested on using it but after a while, when they tried it out, it was pretty convenient for us.

For example, when we couldn't meet on a common slot to discuss something, we could go to the chat room to do the discussion. The best thing about My Community is that it allows everyone in the group (access rights control by the manager who open it) to upload files, which is an attractive feature to me as I don't like group mates who keep sending many copies of updated reports to my mailbox which often cause my NUSNET/Computing UNIX mailbox to get full every now and then as I've four projects to do."

Lee Soo Guan Gibson, 1st year student, Faculty of Engineering

"I use My Community for, as the title of my forum suggests, "everything and anything under the sun". Initially, it was started up for the exchange of new ideas in all directions. Now, not only it is used for studies, this is also the forum to share interesting articles, jokes, documents and links that students may find helpful."