Digital Communication and Collaboration

Brief Summary: In academic study, in personal life, and in career the need to navigate digital communication and collaboration in effective ways is key to success. From email to virtual meetings, virtual events, and collaboration apps; a highly skilled individual in this competency can successfully choose the right communication method for any given situation and can successfully reach goals using available technology tools.  

Learners with proficient skills in digital communication and collaboration should be able to: 

  • Write in a business and professional style for emails and corporate messaging apps 
  • Troubleshoot webcams, microphones, and headphones during virtual meetings 
  • Use cloud services to share documents and projects for multi-user collaboration 
  • Organize email inbox by creating rules and sending automated replies 
  • Send and accept meeting invites via Outlook/email 
  • Manage notifications for corporate messaging apps like Teams or Slack 

Market/Employer Trends: Employers report that they value when employees have strong skills in choosing the right connection tool and the right method for communication and collaboration based on a given situation. They also value when employees demonstrate they can apply basic digital communication etiquette.

 

Self-Evaluation: 

Key questions for reflection: 

  • How much practice have you had with digital communication and collaboration?  
  • From your experience, what’s the difference between in-person communication and digital communication? Which one is more difficult?  
  • What feedback have you received from professors, bosses, and extracurricular advisors about your digital communication skills? 

Strong digital skills in this area could appear as: 

  • Sending clear emails, messages or texts that your professors or friends understand 
  • Success troubleshooting an error when you're using Zoom or Teams (for example, how to change settings or knowing when you need to re-join a call) 
  • Navigating complex virtual conversations to successfully meet goals.  
  • Successfully choosing when an asynchronous (email, Teams message, text, etc.) or a synchronous message (phone call, Facetime, in-person session, etc.) is most appropriate to achieve goals.  

 

Ways to Upskill: 

Ready to grow your strength in this competency? Try: 

 

Educator Tips to Support Digital Skills:

  • Provide activities that allow for group collaboration and support learners by linking to existing Ohio State resources that support navigating digital collaboration (OneNote, Zoom) 
  • Use Microsoft Word for course brainstorming activities and allow students to add their ideas to the document 
  • Share etiquette for Digital Communication that students should align with in your course