SWOT Analyses: Student Collaboration and Using Creately

Student Collaboration

One of this week’s first topics is how SWOT analyses can be a great learning tool for students, thanks to their simplicity and inherent ability to be divided up and distributed.

SWOT analyses are designed to determine how successful a company or even a single business venture might be in a given market, by looking individually at the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats that present themselves [1]. SWOT analyses, also known as SWOT matrices, have the great benefit of being extremely simple to split up, allowing for easy collaboration.

This form of analysis is effective not only for business owners, but also for students who wish to learn more about the forces that govern today’s business world.

Creating SWOT analyses is a great task for groups of students to collaborate on. Because of the inherently divided nature of a SWOT matrix, it’s easy to split up the task into each individual category, allowing students in large groups to work in effectively smaller groups, without getting in each other’s way.

When each group of students is done preparing their part of the analysis (i.e. identifying any strengths, weakness, opportunities or threats), they can all come together to share their thoughts about each of the categories, and eventually make a conclusion about the designated company/venture as a whole.

Have you tried collaborating on a SWOT analysis? What are your thoughts? We’d love to hear about it in the comments section at the bottom of the page.

Creating Your SWOT Analysis Templates with Creately

Creately [2] is an online platform for collaboratively designing diagrams, flowcharts, and more, in real time [3]. Using Creately’s thousands of examples and templates, as well as the native drag-and-drop builder, it is easy to build elegant diagrams with others, online.

The first half of this article discussed student collaboration on SWOT analyses, and Creately is one way to do it. Creately is a fantastic platform for students and professionals alike who want to create SWOT matrices without letting a lack of technological or artistic knowledge hinder them.

While Creately does offer the option to build up to 5 public diagrams for free, it’s clear that their service is intended to run on subscription fees. Starting at $5 per month, users can create an unlimited number of diagrams using real time collaboration with up to 5 others.

Creately happens to have over 25 templates and examples for SWOT diagrams specifically [4].

Here are some of the pros and cons of using Creately to conduct SWOT analyses:

Pros

Easy to use, thanks to the drag-and-drop builder

All online, including editor

Support for real time collaboration with other paying users

No specialist knowledge required to diagram

Clean and sleek interface

Cons

Very limited free use — for best results, it is realistically a paid service starting at $49 annually

Limited visual functionality (as compared to pen and paper)

In a nutshell, Creately is a fair service for collaborating on various diagrams, including SWOT analyses. Despite the fact that the free functionality is very limited, for five dollars a month Creately does offer a good amount of features. Moreover, it is particularly useful for students and less experienced analysts who lack the technological and artistic skills to build attractive digital diagrams from the ground up.

[1] http://pestleanalysis.com/what-is-swot-analysis/

[2] http://creately.com/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creately

[4] http://creately.com/diagram-community/popular/t/swot