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This Week's App: Asana

What is Asana?

Asana is project management tool used by countless people and teams to manage everything from complex initiatives, to managing their day to day tasks. Are you dealing with multiple competing priorities from course developments, department projects, to all the things you need to do for your courses? This tool is perfect for you! Asana allows you to organize all the different projects and courses you or your team are working on in one place so that nothing important is missed.

What can it be used for?

While Asana is mainly a project management tool and not specifically an ed-tech tool, we really do believe it can be very useful for instructors, educators, staff, and students. We all have multiple priorities we have to deal with and in our experience most initiatives or enhancements fail in education because of bad task and project management. So here are our top # idea for how educators/students can use this tool.

1. Personal Task Management - In Asana you can set up “projects” that contain a calendar, task lists, and other boards to show progress. You can set up a project for each course you are teaching or developing, and other initiatives you are working on (e.g. research, committees, etc.). Students can use it to plan out and manage the work they need to get done.
2. Department Management - Academic departments have a lot going on, often managing and planning can be tough. With Asana your team of faculty could work together to manage initiatives or projects you are working on. For example we had one department working on a research project, they could have used Asana to layout timelines for tasks and give live data at any moment about what they were doing and the progress of the project. Need to manage how many syllabi need submitted and finished for the next semester? Asana can help there!
3. Automate Workflows - With paid Asana you can create automated processes to coordinate work with your teams. Imagine being able to automate a workflow for textbook adoption or for curriculum revision. In Asana you could find ways to reduce work by doing this.

How do I get started?

With Asana it is important to figure out first what you will need for your use. If you are going with personal use then the free version is more than enough, if you want to use it with a team, free maybe a good start, but you should look at the feature limitations. You can review the options on Asana’s Pricing page and create an account here.

To learn about using the tool we first recommend checking out the Fundamental guides on the Asana Help page and also check out their Asana Academy to enroll in quick self-paced training courses, both these resources will help you learn what you need to know.