Assessment of the Google Drive tool during university collaborative work

Abstract

Collaborative work is recognized as a teaching-learning strategy in which in a school environment it is identified by working in small or few teams with regard to the group in general. Among the main essential characteristics, it can be identified that each member must understand the objective clearly and efficiently through activities generated by a “community”. In this study, the use of Google Drive will be shown, where students were able to build and edit Word documents from the place where they were without the requirement to be in the same room. With the objective of knowing the opinion about their experience when using Google Drive collaboratively, this descriptive-transectional research had a sample that was made up of 65 students from three groups of the "Research Methodology and Practice" course from the degree of International Business and "Research Methodology" course of the degree of Surgeon and Obstetrician of the University Center of the South of the University of Guadalajara. A digital questionnaire was applied during November and December of 2019, collecting the information to describe their appreciations and experiences. Taking as results that the majority of students (92%) consider that Google Drive collaborated to achieve the learning objective and 97% of students have been able to work collaboratively using Google Drive. Among the main conclusions, it was noted that the free Google Drive offered advantages of synchronous collaboration among team members since communication among the majority of students improved during the assigned activities and became pragmatic for the fulfillment of school activities.