Saint Maryâs College
Saint Maryâs College needed a fresh alternative to Visio. Specifically, the mathematics and computer science professors were hoping to find a platform that would facilitate collaboration between students and teachers. As an added consideration, the school was trying to stick to a budget.
While leading the search for the schoolâs Visio alternative, Steven Broad, assistant professor of mathematics and computer science, discovered Lucidchart. Right away, he could see its vast potential to fit his departmentâs needs.
âI found Lucidchart to be pleasantly intuitive and lacking some of the constraints that a code generation diagramming tool sometimes includes...The ability to export directly to Google Drive was a nice feature from my point of view. Most importantly, my students would not be tied to college-owned computers or to the Windows operating system.â
Within weeks of signing up for an account, Steven and hundreds of his systems analysis and design students ended up using Lucidchart practically every day throughout a capstone course, a teamwork-based class heavily focused on diagrams. The class involved entity relationship diagrams, data flow diagrams, unified modeling language (UML) class diagrams, and other complex diagrams
Since Lucidchart offered the exact systems analysis and design functionality required by Steven and his students, it soon became the go-to information systems diagramming solution. Unlike other platforms, Lucidchart offers the specific notation shapes and symbols required by students to build professional diagrams for use in an information systems environment. Â
Stevenâs students took to Lucidchart right away, many describing it as easy to use and self-explanatory. Better yet, they rarely encountered any technical difficulties to resolve.
Best of all, Steven loved the fact that Lucidchart was available to students in and out of the classroom. This helped make real-time collaboration and sharing possible, crucial requirements for success in Stevenâs course. Rather than emailing diagrams back and forth to each other, risking compatibility issues with software, browser, and operating systems, Lucidchart lets everyone work together in real time on a single document.
Steven explained, âThe collaborative, web-based functionality has greatly reduced the amount of time that students spend embroiled in the logistics of versioning and distributing their diagrams to their team. No team has reported wasted time due to working on the wrong version of a diagram, which has been a regular problem in the past.â