Tools for distributed student projects

Introduction

Unfortunately the Covid-19 pandemic has not ended. This will make working on group projects more challenging, because you may not be able to meet with all your group members, and even if can meet up, you may need to use social distancing. Although this can be frustrating, it does give you the opportunity to learn how to use tools, which can improve your team working skills and to learn about remote working. There have been many articles in newspapers about how remote work will allow more flexible life styles without for example long commutes into work in a major city.

I have worked in many projects with collaborators distributed around the world. I have never found an ideal technical solution to working on a project with a remote team of people. It is possible to work by exchanging files via email and just using skype meetings, but it can be painful to wait 10 minutes in a meeting, while someone looks for an email with a graph, which you circulated 1 week ago. When working jointly on code, please be very careful that you are always working on the latest version, as working on a version that has already been updated can cause frustration and even the loss of marks. Version control systems can help with this problem.

Below are some desirable qualities for tools which are useful for group working

For video conference / chats software is very useful to be able to share a screen, so that you can show your group members your work, such as graphs or calculations.
It is useful to be have documents that can be edited and viewed by all members of the group.
It is important to have a memory of the discussions in the group.
It is useful to have access to project management techniques. This will also help with time management.
Ideally it would be good to have a virtual white board, where ideas and calculations can be discussed in real time .

Group collaboration tools

Microsoft teams. This is comprehensive system, that includes video conferences, chat, and integration of many different applications, such as OneDrive. Microsoft teams should work on PCs, tables and phones. See this very brief introductry podcast specific to the University of Plymouth. See this video from Microsoft and a case study from the University of Plymouth. This is a very good system for coordinating work in student projects. The University of Plymouth has a site license.

What generic tools are available

Below are some different software tools, which can be combined together to create tools to work together online.

Zoom. This is a video conference system with a free option for small meetings. It should be used in combination of other tools, slack as slack.
OneDrive. Students at the University of Plymouth can store of 1 Tbyte of storage. Documents and spreadsheets can be shared and worked on by multiple students. Students can give access to their supervisors.
Google also have a way to share documents via google drive.
Dropbox is another famous system for storing and sharing documents online.
Github is good place to store code. This keeps versions of the code allows collaboration. Please note that the default option for github is public, which may not be great for coursework.
Draw.io This is an online system for creating diagrams such as flow charts. These can be included in latex or word documents.

Mathematical software in the cloud

There are many mathematical software libraries, which can be used in the cloud. Many systems such as R, python, or octave can be downloaded for free to your computer.

Rstudio cloud. This runs R via a web browser. although R is free to install, it may not always be possible to install it if you have a tablet for example.
Overleaf: This is an online system which can create documents with mathematics using latex.
Google also has a system to run python via Jupyter notebook in the cloud, called google collab.
For students at the University of Plymouth, there is information about how to install Maple on your own computer.
Students at the University of Plymouth can install Matlab on their own PCs.. You can also run Matlab in the cloud.

The University of Plymouth has a collection of links to software to help students learn remotely.

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