GroupTable Brings Efficiency To College Collaboration

Group projects in school are usually instituted to facilitate group collaboration, delegation of work, and promote efficient use of time. However, the opposite is usually occurs, resulting in free loading slackers and countless hours wasted procrastinating and attempting to delegate and plan for the next meeting. These inefficiencies and frustrations have led to the creation of GroupTable, an application that "allows students to participate in their study groups, group projects, and organizations online as if they were sitting there together." GroupTable can be thought of as a BaseCamp for college students, eliminating the need for bouncing emails back and forth and in-the-flesh meetings, and satisfying the need for a central location to store and edit documents.

I wish this type of application launched were available (and free) when I first entered college. In addition to the social features you would expect, such as profiles, groups and messaging, the group chat is what really makes the application a value-add. It works just like an AIM chat room in real time, but automatically saves the conversation for future reference. A central location for saved conversations and versions of documents makes collaborating on projects far more efficient than today's standards.

Dave Brim, one of the co-founders, explained that the site has already proven itself as a viable solution allowing one project group to only meet once throughout the semester. Likewise, they already have commitments from a handful of professors in the entrepreneur department at UCF, which is a division of the second largest business school in the country, to use the software over the summer and potentially throughout next school year. On top of this, they recently won $13,000 at the school's business plan competition. Their story parallels ours as we also won first place this year after second place last year, which they also did.

A handful of competitors come to mind such as Google documents, ClassKey, WebCT, and BlackBoard. The main differences with WebCT and Blackboard are that they are for institutions, you can't form your own groups, and students don't usually like to have candid discussions with professors looking over their backs. Google may be the biggest concern, but after using both of them, it would actually be easier to use GroupTable due to its tight integration of all its features in one page. With Google, you would still have to toggle between several different windows to achieve the same functionality.