“It was a great reason to clean up our files,” said Galeano with a laugh. “And they have a lot to move” added Allen Coleman, the ASCTech consultant who has led them through their migration of 114 collections, totaling 31 GB of data. The move included all of the video, audio, pdfs, jpgs, Word documents, and PowerPoint presentations that provide the course material for these courses, even a 12-chapter online textbook, complete with activities.

 

Now, Galeano and Mara are excited about the many new features that Box provides such as support for mobile phone and tablets, more familiar and consistent formatting, and the ability to work collaboratively. Even the lesser-known features have been working well for them. “The comments feature [for our instructor upload area] has been very useful,” said Mara. “Especially for errors on documents, since people can catch the errors, tag them, and we can immediately correct them. It’s really helped to streamline our processes.”

 

“They are a great example of a successful transition,” said Coleman, “Because they had a lot of material and because they reach so many students.” Part of the success of the move may have been the way it was introduced: with presentations in departmental workshops in which Mara and Galeano answered instructor questions. “Once people knew what we were using and why, their anxiety disappeared,” said Galeano. The familiarity that many instructors already had with Box.net certainly helped. “I used Box.net long before I came to OSU, so having it available [from the university] made it easy to start using it,” said Galeano. 

 

If you are Media Manager for Groups site curator, you can look forward to talking with the transition team soon. ASCTech aims to make the transition as smooth as possible so that you feel like Jennifer Galeano: “The only problem with working with Allen is now that we’re about done, we won’t get to see him as much as we’d like.”