University web marketing and usability

News media have been on the lookout for the next buzzword after even technology-averse people have begun to admit that YouTube and MySpace are not just things that weirdos use. A few months ago, they found one, and they threw themselves at it with the desperation that only news media can display. However, in Australia, the news show with probably the highest reputation, “Four Corners” has now committed a whole special edition on Monday night prime time to this virtual world. 

Watch the Four Corners special edition You only live twice online! The show was nicely balanced, and even I as a Second Life user learned something new (usually I don’t get around meeting all these CEOs hehe). If you don’t know much about Second Life, I would strongly suggest to watch this. 

Anyway, the next day I was inundated by text messages, emails, and even colleagues coming to my desk and asking me all sorts of things. It seems as if finally Second Life is showing up on the radar! What does that mean for Australian universities? How could we utilize this online environment in marketing terms? Everybody in “the business” knows that the best ideas are the ones that you can copy Therefore, with a very helpful post from the SLOz blog (a blog dedicated to Australian activities in Second Life), I donned the three Australian universities a visit that have established a presence in Second Life. I won’t follow my catchy headline for this post, but instead talk about the bad one first, then the restricted one, and then the good one, to keep the suspense up, hehe! And here is my verdict: 

AFTRS - most likely how NOT to do it

AFTRS stands for “Australian Film, TV and Radio School“. I don’t want to be too harsh - the Second Life presence is not that bad… but it completely failed to catch my attention. Visitors who teleport to their area (this is the normal way of traveling to a place) find themselves in a little entrance area that leads into a huge dome made of glass. At the bottom, in the concert pit, visitors can use several different instruments, and there are also a few magazines that can be leafed through, and a video screen. It’s a little too simple to impress, so I walk outside and see what else there is. A few more buildings, somewhat hanging in the air, made of glass (because that’s a pretty fancy thing in SL, as you can see the inside without having to go there). These glass towers and bubbles showcase screenshots of student projects, but after walking around between these wallpapers for a few minutes, I get very bored. AFTRS is offering quite a bit of information about the capabilities of their students, but the inconvenience of having to snake my way through the buildings just puts me off after a while. 

Overall, although it’s a relaxed place to simply hang out, I doubt that AFTRS experienced a huge surge in enrolment numbers, or even in visitors to their area. And it’s certainly not something where I would return to check out what’s happening. 

RMIT - Hello? Anybody at home?

With high hopes, I teleport to RMIT university’s island (yes, they have a whole island, not just an area). For all non-Aussies, RMIT is located in Melbourne in First Life A huge video screen hangs in the air, with a comfy couch in front of it. For some reason, I fail to operate the TV, and as you can imagine, my short attention span forces me to lift off and fly to what seems to be the centre of the island - bump! My Sardionerak Sungsoo (that’s me in SL) hits an invisible barrier! It’s restricted access, NOOOOOO! All I can do is fly around the island and look at the constructs from afar How disappointing! The island itself is only occupied to about half its capacity. The “full” half shows a huge variety of different and pretty whacky constructs with no apparent purpose. My wild guess would be that RMIT offers this space as a trial run for some of their students. And that seems to be all RMIT has to offer. I wonder why. I use my 5 minutes of frustration to give my avatar a new look, and off I go to my last destination. 

USQ - Finally! It’s beautiful!

USQ stands for the University of Southern Queensland. My Sardionerak Sungsoo pops up in the welcome area, and right from the start I can see that this environment has been constructed with love! A little sign tells me that the island is in fact a PhD project of the Faculty of Education, by Lindy McKeown (I couldn’t track her down on their web site). Again, the presence is a full island, and this time, it is bursting with details, fun games, handy ideas, information, facilities, and much more. I walk around for over an hour, hanging out on a little boat at the “surf club”, listening to music on a lovely little plaza, walking around the shops (possibly student-generated content on sale), and so much more that this post would be blown completely out of proportion. 

Apart from the many group activities like arm- and mud-wrestling, paddling, swimming, and much more, there are two components that impress me deeply. 

The Shop: While wondering around the plaza, I stumble upon university information almost by accident. It’s a nicely unobtrusive shop that displays information about lecturers, courses, campus life and more. The atmosphere is really leisurely, making it a nice window-shopping experience. The products on the shelves are the links to course web pages, and the shop itself has sections for internationals, undergraduates and postgraduates. There is also a bell on the counter, but currently, there is no help available (I did visit at 1am, so I guess that wasn’t surprising). 

The Learning Facility: On the top of a little mountain, I find a pavillion-like structure with five comfy seating areas and some kind of podium in the middle. Upon closer inspection, signs tell me that this is an online teaching and learning facility! It can take up to 35 and a lecturer, and it can be split into smaller sections for group work. How fancy! The underlying message is that this institute seems to be on the forefront of new learning environment, a very powerful statement. 

SL users visit places all the time, often dozens per session. Places become popular by offering environments that are fun to hang out in, that offer activities that are worth returning for. An “in your face” marketing approach, like the AFTRS one is counter-productive, as it renders the place boring and uneventful. The other end of the spectrum is obviously USQ with its myriads of nice distractions. It enticed me to stay and play, and try out everything that I could see. And because I was so much at ease, walking into a small shop with the courses as a showcase wasn’t a break in my experience at all! All thumbs up for USQ! Lindy seems to have understood what Second Life is all about - entertainment spaces! 

The big question that university marketing departments in Australia have to ask themselves: even if you succeed to attract many users, will they ever convert into the magical “bums on seats”? So far, I would doubt it. It still seems to be too far-fetched for me to imagine a person logging into SL and looking for university information. And the overall tiny number of Australians in the environment makes it quite unlikely to attract the attention of significant numbers of school-leavers. However, the prestige that a good online presence in Second Life brings is not to be discarded lightly. And as USQ has shown, the main focus doesn’t have to be marketing, it can also be online learning and facilitation. And then for marketing to slip in a stand with information is the easiest thing  

Now that Second Life has received a considerable amount of press, it was only a matter of time until another company came forward with a new bold claim to make it all bigger, better, and faster: Outback Online!

As I have already said in a previous post on Second Life, I can quite easily imagine that Second Life is not the final step in the development. Being a World of Warcraft gamer myself, I know what is possible in terms of usability, graphics, and immersion, and Second Life certainly falls short in each category. Maybe Outback Online is the next thing, who knows?

When a marketing colleague forwarded me an article about it in the Sydney Morning Herald, it was already the second time that I heard about it. However, the head of the company, a guy called Randal Leeb-du Toit, didn’t have anything new to say. In fact, he reminded me very much of those CEOs at the end of the last millenium, praising their shares, although their companies had nothing to offer.

And checking out the web site about Outback online certainly gives my suspicions a solid foundation: Outback Online. There is nothing there! It’s simply a very cheap text, and a sign-up form for a “newsletter”. I signed up, but for some reason I am now very scared that this was some sort of internet scam to get my email address, and I will be inundated with Russian porn and African pharmaceuticals… I also checked out the blog, and it’s the same. Either these guys are the worst communicators you can imagine, or this is simply one big hoax.

Stay tuned, and I will let you know!

Most of the time, I point at other people’s research and then give my 2 cents, which must be quite boring for some of you. However, today, I can finally offer another original piece of research that I was able to conduct, thanks to some of my colleagues (not sure if I could name them here, so I won’t).

This week was Orientation week for our new semester in 2007, and we got a whole new bunch of Internationals of different categories (exchange, study abroad, true internationals, and so on). A colleague of mine meets with the exchange students and the study abroad students in this week as well, and our little marketing department in the Faculty decided that this would be a unique opportunity for a survey.

The Rationale

We would actually like to establish a network of international students writing about their experience at our Faculty. We believe that this is a fantastic idea, so that students from other countries can follow them around and hopefully try to get to UTS as well. We also believe that this would be a great service for our own students who think to go on exchange, as they could get in touch with these people to learn more about their countries. Our Student community section , which was our first cautious attempt to bring students together online, is struggling. We also want to find students who might volunteer to write about their experiences in our own little international student blog. And last but not least, we would like to target our marketing for international students better, therefore we wanted to find out where they were at on the web.

The setting

Exchange students: UTS has exchange agreements with a huge range of universities in other countries. It’s based on a swap: we get one of their students, while one of ours can go to their place. Although a great concept for our students, sadly there is no extra money for us in it.

Study abroad students: Students of other countries who come to Australia to study for one or two semesters, and then go back to go on with their degree at home. They pay the full international fee, which is (and that’s no surprise) not cheap

Sample size: 20 students, either exchange or study abroad

Questionnaire: handed out on paper, with about 5 minutes to fill out.

Answers: the answers were personal, with names, web addresses and much more. I have deleted all of this data from the questionnaire. Thus, the answers below are not entirely what the students gave us, but I have not changed the message at all.

Download the HSS Internationals moderated answers here.

My analysis

There are many many social networkers!

At least in our sample, there were 13 (!!!) out of 20 who were part of at least one social networking software like MySpace, blogs, Facebook, or others. I find this pretty impressive, especially because of the findings of the University of Melbourne that I portrayed in my last article. They had found that Australian students were rather cautious in their pick up of these applications. That leads me to my next point:

International students in Australia are ahead of Australian students in social networks

The University of Melbourne had already pointed out that international students made more use of social networking applications. Our findings here at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney, support this. I have also commented repeatedly to some of my colleagues in the web division that North Amerika and Europe are about 6-12 months ahead in picking up new things. One Canadian student proved that powerfully. When I asked the students to show hands for people with MySpace accounts, she said “MySpace was so yesterday! It’s all about Facebook now!” Something that I’ve had on my radar for quite some time, and that won’t come as a surprise to most of the readers of this blog.

Social networking is global, but the applications can be local

This was a real surprise to me! Whereas the English-speaking countries seem to use the same applications, maybe slightly shifted in time, the non-English speaking countries might not necessarily do the same. The Germans in the crowd were quite keen to promote an application called studivz which seems to be very much like Facebook. This means that targeted marketing efforts for certain countries would need to find out what’s hot and what’s not before creating internet presences in applications that might be not at all popular in that country.

International students are happy to share

I was very impressed by the readiness with which students agreed to share their personal accounts of their lives in Australia! Pretty much everybody who had an internet presence wanted to share it with us, and was happy to help. This enthusiasm to help is nothing new amongst international students, but I would have thought that at least some had opted to stay private. Obviously, we are ecstatic about this, and I will let you know what we make out of this!

That’s all. I admit, it’s a small sample, but there are gems of wisdom in the answers! I can’t wait to apply this, I am very excited! Because of this great success, UTS: HSS might conduct more research on a bigger scale. Wouldn’t we all love that? More research to go around I think we have found a few new champions for our cause!

How cool is this headline? Yes, it could also be published in British newspapers of ill repute (no offense), but it’s a great attention grabber, isn’t it?

As usual, I have to thank the blogs first who gave me the idea for this post: templatedata and collegewebeditor ! The University of Melbourne released another one of their beautiful web reports at the end of 2006: First Year Students’ Experiences with Technology . It’s a definitive must-read for all people involved in Australian Higher Ed Marketing, but I guess it could also be applied to other countries. My experience shows that Australian students are lagging behind the USA by about 6 months in terms of picking up new web trends and technologies.Don’t be fooled by the rather unusual unit that created the report: the Biomedical Multimedia Unit, Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences . The report is in fact about first year students of all kinds of faculties, therefore, again my plead, read it! The report is actually a good read and specifically points out a few interesting facts that might have evaded immediate attention otherwise. It explains the heterogenity of the “Net Generation” which is more or less defined by the fact that its members grew up in an electronic environment. Therefore, it is often the case that these new students have significantly more knowledge of the latest IT trends and technologies than the lecturers. Although the report focusses rather on how this might affect teaching and learning in universities in the 21st century, we marketing people can interpret many of the findings for our needs as well. Let me show you

Difference between International students and local students

I think a lot of people have already assumed this, but it’s good to see it supported by numbers. In almost all categories of computer technologies, international students were significantly more likely to use them on a regular basis than local students. There was no investigation why that was the case but I think it can be safely assumed that internationals would use computer technologies to stay in touch with their home countries. Also, for an international to find out information about the university abroad, they need to be internet-savvy to start with.

What this means: computer technologies can now play an even bigger role in the recruitment of international students, and new concepts could be developed that would be picked up very quickly and eagerly by this target audience.

Difference between users and non-users

The report holds impressive data on what percentage of students have access to and/or are using certain technologies. It also holds information on students who have never done so. For example, 72.9% have unrestricted access to a broadband connection, whereas 18.1% don’t. An even better example is the unrestricted access to game consoles: 47.4% have it, whereas 36.6% have non at all.

What this means: Having a large portion of a user group that has NO access to a technology at all might seem like an indicator to discard this technology. However, I would like to argue that it also bears a chance to target the part of the audience that DOES have access, as it will most likely be picked up more eagerly. For example, in Australia, 62.6% have never used social networking sites on the internet!!! However, this means that 37.4% would probably be quite appreciative for marketing in that area, and that is quite a good number. If you don’t agree, please let me know, hehe!

Do not rely on one computer technology for your marketing

The heterogenity in categories like “use of social networking” or “use of blogs” shows that even among the net generation, people have very different experiences with technologies. Some seem to be very eager to make use of a broad range, while others seem almost untouched by the developments of the last few years.

What this means: Keep developing wonderful marketing campaigns using the latest hypes and trends on the web, but don’t rely on a small number of channels to get your message across. I think this is a very important point, and something that many people within marketing departments have to understand. Yes, have a good university web site, but you should ALSO have a presence in social networks, AND maybe RSS feeds, AND maybe content for mobile phones, AND AND AND…

Lagging development, but certainly here to stay

Most of the blogs that I am reading about Higher Ed Marketing are written about American universities. The challenges they are facing seem to be ahead by 6 - 12 months in my experience. For example, I have read many articles about how MySpace and Facebook have had a huge impact on certain marketing operations. In Australia, only 11.1% of first year students use social networking software daily. However, to prove my point, technologies like mobile phones with cameras, internet, and other stuff has followed development in the US and has reached almost complete saturation levels.

What this means: assuming that the current trend continues, Australian marketing can look across the Pacific and watch their future unfold, knowing that in 6-12 months they are likely to face the same development. Obviously, there are exceptions. For example, the YouTube hype was global and didn’t lag as much, but especially new software ideas that need time for people to get their heads around and that need critical masses of generations to use them (like networking stuff), I personally assume that this trend will continue.

Faculties are different

The report shows that the Faculty of Engineering and the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning were the ones with students who used new technologies most frequently, whereas the Faculty of Education and the Faculty of Arts where the ones with students on the other side of the spectrum.

What this means: Although university branding is obviously extremely important, I see this as justification for marketing departments in the different faculties. These faculty units should be capable of running campaigns that are specialised at the needs of their own students, taking into accounts the difference in their audiences.

That’s about as much as I want to say about this report (I know, it’s been quite a bit). I strongly suggest you read it, the figures will certainly help you to understand the current state of Australian first year students, which will make it much easier to improve marketing campaigns aimed at their specific needs and wants. It would be fantastic if other universities picked up this questionnaire or a similar one so that we get a more conclusive picture. Also, longitudinal studies would be great to see a development of certain trends. Any takers?

I don’t know how it is in other parts of the world, but here in Australia, Second Life is slowly gaining momentum in the media. The early signs of a hype are there - you can tell because they really make stories out of nothing. I guess now that even grand-parents have heard of YouTube, the press needs something new to “wow” their audience.

For those who haven’t heard of it, Second Life is a 3D online environment created by Linden Lab . In contrast to games like World of Warcraft , it is actually not a game but a social space, basically the internet, but in 3D. Individuals can join this online environment for free, can create their own avatars, and then simply explore. You can walk, fly, and for the big distances, simply teleport from place to place. For real money, you can buy in-game Linden dollars that are then used to enhance  your avatar in terms of looks or gadgets (you can for example buy yourself a plane or a car, or simple a helmet). There are virtually no limits to what you could buy, as long as someone else has used Second Life’s scripting language to program the effect of the item.

Where it gets really interesting now is that companies (and individuals) can purchase pieces of land or their own islands, and then start building structures on it. And this is where marketing kicks in. There are no limits to the architecture, as there is no real gravity, so you see quite a bit of funky stuff hanging about in the air, castles, large beach mansions (yes, Second Life has its own oceans) and much more. After having spent a few nights in this environment, I have tested some of these buildings. For example, I went into a small castle and found that a singer (in real life) used this building to showcase their latest CDs (you could listen in on the tracks, and the covers were slowly rotating in the air). If you were interested enough, you could click on the covers, and a normal 2D web site in your default browser came up.

I also took part in an interesting random discussion: I went to the Australian Library, and there were 6 people sitting around a table (one looked like death himself, another one like a dragon). I joined them, and we chatted about the metaverse, social stuff, and my idea to develop a presence for my university. It was a nice social experience and shows another great potential for these environments.

Obviously, I was very interested in what was out there in terms of universities. Australian universities are very rare, I could only find RMIT, and that was still under construction, ie inaccessible. I tried to search for University of Southern Queensland  to teleport there, but couldn’t find it in the very limited search engine of the game. Other American unis had buildings, but they failed to impress me as recruitment tools, as they were just too tedious to walk through, and didn’t really offer anything. It was even difficult for me to find the interface that then led me to their web sites.

Let’s talk about disadvantages of Second Life right now:

1.) Travelling

The traveling modes are walking, flying, and teleporting. People only walk if they are inside buildings, because it is really tedious to move that way. The characters are slow, and don’t respond accurately when you turn. Flying is fun as you can see the landscape from a bird’s eye perspective, but because your angle of view is fixed (you can only stare ahead) you are prone to miss out on stuff. Teleporting only helps if you can find the place in the in-game search engine.

2.) Technical lag and getting stuck
Second Life is slow. When you teleport to a new place, the landscape around you builds itself up like a progressive download. That means that you might think in the beginning you stand on a piece of lawn, but suddenly a huge wall of a building pops up  in front of you… Also,  I often experienced situations where I simply couldn’t leave certain places any more, and my avatar indulged in quite frantic behaviour. I could only fix it by rebooting.

3.) Critical mass is not reached yet - not even close

Linden Lab boasts 3 million users for Second Life - experts say that you can assume around 10% are active users, that makes an audience of around 300,000 users worldwide. And trust me, the place is big! That means that if you don’t know where the social hubs are, you are very likely to be very alone in there. Meetings with other individuals are almost accidental in the beginning.

4.) Very poor usability

Clothing your character, picking up objects, and much more doesn’t only take a lot of time to learn, it’s also quite tedious later. It certainly hinders people to fully immerse themselves into the life online, because it is so painful to do some of the most basic tasks.

Now to the advantages

1.) First mover advantage

Second Life is new . Played the right way, you will receive a lot of press coverage if you move your institution in there. People just love that kind of stuff, and the press can use beloved terms like “cyber-” and “virtual” and we all know how they love that. Once everybody has a presence in such an environment, you won’t get that coverage any more.

2.) Preparing yourself for the future

Second Life has a lot of short-comings, but it certainly points in the direction the internet is taking. If we assume that visionaries like William Gibson (author of the famous Neuromancer) were right, the internet is headed towards a sparkly simulation of real life. Therefore, you might dump some money into Second Life, and the system might go down after a couple of years because the technology wasn’t up for it yet, or because of poor usability, but with the next system that comes up, you  have already gone through the steps, and  you will be able to respond more quickly.

3.) Portray yourself as cutting-edge

Obviously, that is something that a lot of higher education institutions want to do, and getting into those new developments early usually supports that reputation.

4.) Create a buzz around your institution in Second Life

You can host events,  you can let your programmers design gadgets that everybody wants to have, you can build a fantastic building that people simply want to teleport to because it’s so beautiful, and so on… if you manage that  your representation in there becomes one of the places to be, then you REALLY hit it off! Although empty in most areas, there are hubs with hundreds of avatars in one room, and we all know that this would be the coolest, no sorry, kewlest thing

Conclusion:

I say, try it out for your institution. You don’t need the best programmer to establish an online presence (but you certainly need someone who is a fast learner, this will take some time). Get yourself a small block of land, build a moderate house, and see if it’s the right thing for the kind of marketing department that you are in. Connect a few objects in that house to your internet home page, download some of the tracking software in Second Life, and advertise your presence on your web site. Then sit and wait I will certainly endeavour to do the same thing. I would advise not to pour large amounts of money into this just yet,  I am personally not 100% confident that Second Life itself will last, it still has too many mistakes. However, it was only announced last month that the code went open-source, so maybe lots of the short-comings will be fixed soon.

Once you have built something, let me know, and I will fly by   My name in the game is Sardionerak Sungsoo, see you there!

Happy new year to all of you! A colleague of mine sent me a link to a blog post on university web sites with a little rant about how committees can ruin a crystal clear message.

The author seems to have had quite a few bad experiences with committees:

“It seems that committees have the ability to water down and destroy what the designers might promote. The other really bad thing that seemed to happen is that someone high up, not involved in the process at all, would just make an executive decision about the site or its design and force changes. In the end watered down design is what your often left with.”

Indeed, this can happen, and I guess increasingly so if you as the designer are significantly lower in the hierarchies than members of these decision-making groups. The most frustrating scenario is when you are not ALLOWED to offer your input to a committee, and then yes, I agree, you find a formerly good draft in your inbox that suddenly only vaguely resembles your approach…

However, I see this issue with a much more positive attitude: the main thing to do is to participate in these committees. There are many advantages when doing so:

1.) Participants put a face to your name, which will usually make them more prone to get in contact with you, instead of making decisions without you.

2.) Members can see how psyched and enthusiastic you are about your approach, and especially participants who don’t have much internet experience themselves usually find this quite pleasing. My own experience has always been that people insecure about issues they don’t fully grasp are thankful for someone to tell them that it is indeed a good thing they are about to ratify.

3.) Bring discussions back to the point. We all know what it can be like: you wanted them to discuss the template, and all they got hung up with was the font colour. You have the chance to tell them that this is not really what they were here for.

4.) OWNERSHIP! There is nothing, let me repeat, NOTHING, worse than committee members who later in the process have to generate content for the site, to lose touch with the development. They have to have the feeling that they contributed, that their opinions were at least considered (and if it was only to explain to them why you think that another approach might be better). Often, dissatisfaction is born out of lack of knowledge, and you as the web admin are the one with the biggest knowledge! Make participants feel that they are part of the process, and I can almost guarantee that they will not be in your way, or deliver more reliably.

I know that I am very much alone with my love for meetings, but I hope that at least some readers can agree with me on a few points. Yes, committees get on people’s nerves, and can make the best process grind to a halt, but it’s more about the spin that you give such meetings, and not so much about possible negative outcomes. You still have plenty of time to curse them if they don’t deliver later, or politically annihilate you (just kidding).

If you have described to the same RSS feeds as I have, you might have noticed that now at the end of the year, a lot of people are asking “The whole podcasting hype - was it worth it?”.

Just a few articles as examples:

Colgate University Podcasts Revisited

One Year Later: Mansfield University’s Podcasting Initiative

And there are plenty more. Well, I guess everybody will agree that the word “podcast” was one of the big buzzwords of 2006. I always use the cheaply produced but inflationarily distributed student election posters as a guideline. Almost all of them promised to “fight for podcast lectures”, although this is the last time I heard of them about that topic. There were some frantic reactions within our faculties this year, and I was often in their centre, to get our own podcast stream on the way. We failed, not so much because of lack of equipment or expertise (I have some colleagues who have produced podcasts for whole conferences), but rather due to a lack of manpower for generating the actual content.

And we are still trying to tackle this. I guess one of the problems we face is that there is no push from our actual university marketing unit to get a podcast stream on the way, and I find that such an undertaking is too much to cope for just a single faculty. Reading through what colleagues especially of the American universities write, the main use of podcasts seems to be for the recruiting effort. This would suggest that podcast pieces pick out the gems of university research, or student activities, in short - anything that portrays the whole university under a good light. I wonder what kind of unit might champion something like this in the “successful” universities.

Approaching 2007, one might also ask: if I failed to jump on the podcasting bandwagon, shall I simply miss a step and leap right to video podcasts, or video pieces in general? The effort itself is not that much bigger than producing a decent audio podcast, but the result is so much better looking! More than ever, the marketing department would have to be the one to drive this, maybe supported by a few film students (they usually come cheaply), and input from the Research Office. Anybody up to that stage already? I would be very keen to get in touch.

I personally find it very interesting that discussion might have shifted from “Let’s get all we have up on the web as podcasts” to “Let’s be very careful what we pick” over the course of 2006. I guess it’s the normal market maturity cycle. I would in fact love to see more research on exactly WHO the people are who listen to this. So far we only hear talk about overall numbers of feed subscribers, but are these potential students, current students, other researchers, academics, parents…? If you have any research about this, please let me know.

Again, thanks to an interesting article in Collegewebeditor, I became aware of a new approach to tackle services for current students at a university. Please view and marvel:

Student Gateway (Bowdoin)

As hard as it is to believe, this amazing piece of work was created by a student of that university. It bundles the RSS feeds that are provided by different parts of Bowdoin, and offers them in a way that we are usually only used to by the internet blue chip companies like Google and Yahoo!.

I find the execution of this project simply breath-taking. The usability could not be better, everything is dragable, customizable, updateable, and lots more “-ables” that I can’t even list without this entry becoming too long. The real beauty is that lengthy and very boring and frustrating discussions about “what our users want” become a thing of the past: you simply offer them all the bits and say “Here, build it yourself!”. And as long as  you offer enough different modules, how much better could it get?

Again, Bowdoin is really good in this. When you actually check every little module on its own, you can see that every one of them contains a little world of information, sometimes with a scroll bar, often tabbed, fade-ins, graphics, and so much more.

I guess the next stage would be to create an entire university web site according to this model. Certain mandatory elements could be shown all the time without the possibility to remove them, but I see a huge potential for these modules to really enhance the experience that users might have when surfing through tertiary education sites.

More of this, please!!!

Australia is heading towards a very interesting system of fund allocation for research at universities: the (in-)famous Research Quality Framework (RQF). In a nutshell, from early 2008, research funds will be allocated according to the impact that research has on the national and international research community. How exactly that works, I don’t really know, but you might imagine that this has vast re-percussions on how research-active academics SELL their research - for many of them an entirely new concept!

In a former post, I already spoke about how MQtv handled this really nicely, with little packaged movie clips in BBC documentary style. That’s what you can do with a big budget… I won’t be reviewing the efforts of other universities just yet (maybe in a later post), but rather give a few ideas of what could be done:

1.) Show relevance

Obviously, there is a lot of research out there that is pretty abstract. However, you have to make the effort to write up results of research as if it was the one piece that could save mankind. I am sure that most people will know that already, but far too often I read pieces where I wonder why exactly these people got funding in the first place.

2.) Really offer your research

Many research articles on university web sites are very vague in their outcomes. Of course, I can understand that academics don’t want to give away too much, as colleagues could just snap it up, but in the end, this is what the RQF is about: people relating to your work! This is how part of the impact is measured, with people reading of real results and quoting them in their pieces. In my job, I encounter a strong reluctance towards this point, and arguments to pacify stakeholders need to be framed very carefully.

3.) Make it compelling, both content and layout

“A picture says more than a thousand words” - why not put in a nice graph? Yes, I know, accessibility and all the yadda yadda, but in the end, a graph is a very easy way to describe connections where you would need a full page of text to express just the same. Also, the style of writing needs to be rather newspaper style than academic publication style. The balance between entertainment and providing relevant material can be very hard to strike, and it is also definitely the most time-consuming bit for the person who puts the article up on the web.

4.) All research in one place, but everywhere

Catchy headline, isn’t it? What I mean is: research needs to be accumulated at a very small number of central points, so that users don’t have to surf the whole site to see what is the latest. However, there is nothing to prevent you from putting little snippets of information all across the site, that then lead to this central page. Watch this space, I will reveal what we will be doing for another faculty in a couple of months.

I am sure that there are many more points, and how you get your hands on research material as a web coordinator is a whole new HUGE can of worms (which I am sure I will moan about in another post). Please let me know if you find really good examples for higher education research on the web, I am would be very interested to steal some of their ideas!

By mere chance, I stumbled upon a very interesting web page that listed all of the Australian university networks and their members:

Groupings of Universities in Australia

That in itself is not very fascinating, institutions claim to be part of networks all the time. However, when I started checking out all the listed university web sites for logos, it became more interesting!

The Group of Eight universities are those sandstone universities with big budgets, a well-established followership, probably rather successful alumni donation networks, and in general the usual university degrees like law, business and the like. The name alone makes this a very exclusive club - taking someone else up in their ranks would render the whole name useless, hehe, so I guess that “ain’t gonna happen”. Most interesting is that every single one of these universities sports the GO8 logo on their web sites! This doesn’t only show that members are quite proud to be in the club, it is also fantastic for search engine rankings. Having the 8 biggest universities in Australia point at each other with links will boost your ranking substantially with minimum effort.
The actual GO8 web site is pretty bad, but who cares, its function is fulfilled by being a pool of “Australia’s finest”. Is it just me, or can I smell cigar smoke in the air… The site is certainly not visually appealing. The news section seems to be updated fairly regularly, but across the site, I counted at least three major breaches in navigational consistency. It’s more like a patchwork of update sections than a planned web presence. I guess, why bother if the reputation of your members does the job anyway?

The contrast to the Australian Technology Network is substantial. What catches the eye right away is that the word “university” doesn’t come up - what a missed opportunity. The members are well known, but are rather connected to keywords like science, engineering, design, and such. However, most of them offer the same kind of courses as sandstone universities, they just portray them as more hands-on, and less based on an established history (mostly because they don’t have a long one yet). Let’s have a look at their web sites:
University of South Australia has the logo (which looks a little child-like) at the bottom of the template. However, Curtin University of Technology, RMIT University, and Queensland University of Technology only have a text link at the bottom of their page. This might actually be better in terms of SEO but it certainly doesn’t portray this as an exclusive club where membership is something special. University of Technology, Sydney, doesn’t even bother to put the link in, they have no acknowledgement of their membership - what a missed opportunity!
The ATN web site really needs an overhaul, it looks more like a hasty site for a kids show on TV. Graphics are of poor quality, and the content fails to impress. I guess it must be difficult to run such a site, to put different institutions that are in fact competitors under one umbrella.

Innovative Research Universities Australia has a very simple web site, certainly no bells and whistles included. It seems to be updated okay, and offers actually quite useful introductions to its member universities. Members treat their membership logo quite differently: Flinders University sports it in a prime real estate spot right on the home page. Most of the others have it at the bottom of their homepage, apart from Latrobe University which doesn’t acknowledge its membership at all.

The New Generation Universities (NGU) combines ten smaller universities, but the body doesn’t even have a web site! Going through the URLs, it reads like a who’s-who of terrifying web designs, apart from University of the Sunshine Coast and possibly University of Western Sydney. It doesn’t come as a surprise that not a single one of these universities have a logo or notice of any kind anywhere on their web sites that they belong to this “club”. I wonder, why come up with something like that if it has no impact whatsoever? And creating a web site for it shouldn’t be too much hassle. The other three networks show that even minimum effort could create something better than theirs

In general, I strongly believe that these networks, although they might not be well-known to the common citizen, could in fact really boost site traffic and international recognition on the web if they were done properly. Right now, I see a huge amount of missed opportunity in there, and I fail to understand why that is the case…