Group work

The cloud services Seafile and Overleaf, hosted by LUIS, enable students and employees of LUH to access documents collaboratively and simultaneously.

With its Office integration, Seafile offers similar functions to Google Docs. It allows you to share your own files with other users, insert comments, embed images and videos, and download documents. In addition to texts, you can also create spreadsheets and presentations.

The online editor Overleaf is particularly good for displaying mathematical formulas, as it uses the LaTeX typesetting system. Overleaf can also be used by several people at the same time and offers a wide range of settings options, as well as an integrated chat function.

Alternative collaborative writing tools include EtherPads or apps for online whiteboards that offer similar functions (e.g. Miro), but these are not currently offered by Leibniz University.

By combining these tools with video conferencing tools, it is also possible to discuss or conduct joint research while writing. For working group meetings, there are tools that are not primarily intended for teaching, but are well suited for smaller group discussions. More information on the individual tools can be found on the LUIS website.

Online writing tools also offer many advantages for asynchronous, i.e. time-delayed, work. Depending on the goal and nature of the collaboration, forums, wikis and study groups are also suitable for this purpose. Forums and wikis are available in both Stud.IP and ILIAS. Study groups can be used in Stud.IP, and in ILIAS, groups for student collaboration can be set up within courses using all the tools available in ILIAS.

A wiki consists of interconnected HTML pages that can be freely edited. This makes it suitable for a wide range of applications, such as collecting information or collaborative text work. All participants in an event have the right to create, edit and delete texts. Additional functions in the Stud.IP and ILIAS wiki include versioning, author attribution for changes, a quick link list for navigation, image insertion, and more. The ILIAS wiki also offers page templates and page write protection.

The forum is a tool for exchanging questions, opinions and experiences. Contributions can be subscribed to, exported, marked as favourites and edited.

To form independent study groups, any user, including students, can create study groups in Stud.IP. These groups can use many of the tools in Stud.IP that are also available in courses.