Robin Fowler at the University of Michigan (Engineering) has been using Google docs/draw to monitor group process. The students meet remotely and their design work takes place in the doc/draw. She can trace the types of conversations they are having, both in real time (where she can intervene if necessary) and afterwards (by saving the conversation thread into a Word doc). She did a SOTL project comparing audio tapes of face-to-face students vs. the conversation threads in the online groups, and the discussion was much more distributed for the online groups (although students were not always as happy with the online groups vs. face-to-face).

You can find a description of Robin’s approach in this Occasional Paper on using online collaboration tools: http://www.crlt.umich.edu/sites/default/files/resource_files/CRLT_no31.pdf

You can access a video of Robin explaining how she uses this approach: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvLCcoTQ6C0&feature=youtu.be

Finally, you can find a collection of examples (many of them videos) of faculty from a variety of disciplines using online collaboration tools: http://www.crlt.umich.edu/oct