Enabling e-Collaboration and e-Pedagogy at an academic institution in the UAE

Academic Institutions have come a long way from the time when teachers used to teach the concepts using chalks and blackboards and students used to listen to the lecture and rapidly take down notes in their notebooks. The world has witnessed a sea of change in academic delivery and pedagogy of teaching. Other notable change that have been observed recently is the use of technology in teacher collaboration and academic administration. Paper attendance sheets have made way to electronic attendance musters, where teachers can mark students´ presence, absence or even enter late marks, which can instantaneously be viewed across the system by different department chairs and administrators. Many Universities have started using Microsoft SharePoint as an academic e-Collaboration tool. Weblogs, or blogs are increasingly being used as collaborative and business intelligence tools by Corporate organizations. Wikis represent flexible tools functioning as open-ended environments for collaboration while also offering support for group writing support. This paper aims to portray the efforts undertaken by a leading academic institution on the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to incorporate technologies such as Microsoft SharePoint, Blogs and Wikis to reinforce its academic processes as well as provide for effective collaboration among its faculty and administration. It attempts at sketching a detailed account of how the institution tried to adopt e-Collaboration using Microsoft SharePoint and to develop an e-Pedagogy using Microsoft SharePoint, Wikis and Blogs using a structured methodology.