Identifying and proposing how to lower communication barriers in your institution is a particular learning strength of this team exercise. Learners may draw upon their first-hand knowledge of how they feel “communicated,” to reprise the first Teaching Point. Rather than perform an exercise simulating customers, they are the real customers. Are they beneficiaries of these communications or victims of their failings? This matter is of real importance to them. Today’s young adult generation has grown up on the Net and adeptly uses cell phones, PDAs, and mp3 players. This enhancement exercise asks them to consider how your institution might convert all vital communications to this all-electronic telecommunications domain. 

Questions:

1. Doubtlessly, some of the teams completing the Communications Barriers exercise will include in their remedies reaching them via the Internet or an intranet. This exercise asks them to take this to an extreme. Ask the same teams (or new teams) to: Envision how this college/university could continuously deliver electronically all information they believe students must have to get the most value from their schooling. Thus, the title, Fully e-Formed.

2. Ask them to work back from an image of the student who has mobile (wireless) means of connecting to the institution via the Internet, as well as at home or at work. This person represents them at their busiest. What would be ideal to keep her or him fully informed and in control of when and how they receive this information?

3. They may work from the lists their team or the class has recorded. The task is to challenge each practice (like the catalogue or registration) being done any way but electronically. It would have to be incorporated into a single e-Form system or be eliminated.

4. Despite the short amount of time a team would have to design a single-source, fully-accessible system, believe that they will come up with some extraordinary preliminary concepts. The antecedents are already out there in the business world and there in your institution in pieces. Call upon a spokesperson from each team to make a brief presentation of the design.

5. Discuss the similarities and differences in these designs. Then, close with a discussion of this question: Assuming our designs would dissolve barriers to communication, who might be on the other side working to keep them intact and why?