SloanSpace Primer for Users

 

What is SloanSpace?

SloanSpace is a portal community and course management system for the MIT Sloan School of Management.  During the Spring of 2001, it is open to all courses and community groups are being piloted.

 

Who to Contact

Sloan Technology Services administers SloanSpace and the contact person for training, information and problems is Deirdre Kane, dekane@mit.edu, 617-252-1110.

 

How to Register and Who can self-register?

Use your full MIT email name (yoohoo@mit.edu) to register yourself at http://sloanspace.mit.edu.  You will be mailed a verification email.  Once you verify your registration information, you can log in using the password you chose.  If you do not use an MIT email name, then you need to first register in SloanSpace and then make sure that your professor to program administrator has sent dekane@mit.edu  a list of the non-MIT people participating in the class to community. 

 

When you register, you create a profile containing basic information, such as your full name, email, and personal home page (optional).  You can edit your profile at any time from the Control Panel page of your personal portal.  This is also where you can correct any user information and change your password.

 

Portals and portlets

SloanSpace is organized around the concept of portals for groups: individual, class and community.  Each Portal page consists of “portlets”, which are tables of data that deliver the content posted by groups.  For example, the Announcements portal will list all the current announcements posted by a user's classes and communities (once those groups have been joined).  Through the Customize the Portal link in the Control Panel, a user can add content to some portlets (Stocks and Weather, for example), move the portlets to different location on a page, add other portlets, or remove ones that you do not want to see.  Some portlets, Announcements, for example, cannot be removed. 

 

Joining Groups

Once logged in, the user enters the personal portal, which is distinguished by its red headings.  Then each user needs to join the classes and communities to which they belong.  To join a group, go to the Control Panel page and click the Join a Group link.  Scroll to the bottom of the page and click the Join links next to the desired class or community.  Once you have joined all your groups, return to your main page by clicking the My Space link at the top of the page.  Now, you will see your groups listed in the My Groups portlet on your main page.  Follow the links for the classes to the class portal pages.  Any content added to your groups -- Calendar events, Announcements, Bulletin Boards, Files, FAQs, Surveys -- will get pushed/posted in your personal portal.

 

Personal Portal (Red)

The default pages seen in each portal are: MySloanSpace, Calendar, My Files and Control Panel.  However, by selecting Customize this Portal from the Control Panel, any user can modify the look of her portal by rearranging the order of the portlets for any of the pages, and one can add a new page to the portal.  This new page would then be listed at the top of the main portal page along with the other default pages.

 

Community Portal (Green)

The default pages for this portal are: Community Home, Calendar, File Storage, People and Control Panel.  For the Spring of 2001, there will be a limited number of Communities piloted: Sloanwide, Student Discussion Forums, Career Development Office, and four student clubs:  MediaTech, Management Consulting, Sloan Women in Business and Graduate Management Society.

 

Course Portal (Blue)

This portal delivers class documents, announcements, assignments and other resources to the student, customized by the professor of each class.  All class sessions and date-dependent assignments are in the class calendar, while additional files and resources are downloadable from file storage.

 

Bulletin Boards

Each Course and Community can have bulletin boards for its members.  All users can post new topics and reply to current topics.  Please be aware that when you reply via email, the reply posts all text in the body of the email and does not interpret HTML, so delete all extraneous information (including headers and footers) before submitting your reply.  Users can edit their email alerts (by default, all users receive email messages regarding all bulletin board postings) through their Control Panel.

 

Calendar and File Storage

Users can use file storage for personal files, but there is a 2 MB limit for all files and files can only be downloaded one file at a time.  Personal events can be stored in the personal calendar and all group events will be pushed to each user's personal calendar.