Archive for November, 2007

Today, Inside Higher Ed has a great well-researched and well-written piece about a trend that will change the face of IT departments on most campuses in a few years: “When emailed is outsourced.” (Don’t forget to share it with your IT folks!)

In his article, Andy Guess, Mr. Technology at IHE, gives a very good overview of this trend and hints what’s to come with the help of Adrian Sannier, CTO at ASU:

Once colleges get used to the idea of allowing an outside technology firm to handle their e-mail services, there’s no telling what else they’ll be receptive to. Already, “software as a service” has been catching on in the business world and in higher education, as institutions realize that they can more easily (and more cheaply) manage basic functions by using Web-based software that’s hosted externally.

[...]

“I believe that this move by universities toward outsourcing, if you will, their e-mail, that represents the beginning of a sea change, a change in university information technology from … direct provision of services to becoming agents of value-added applications, emerging technologies to the core business of the universities, which they haven’t really been in for a long time,” said Adrian Sannier, the university technology officer at Arizona State University.

Later in the piece, Sannier gives an example of future possible developments in higher ed applications:

One example Sannier cites as a possible future capability is the application of Amazon.com-like profiles to university Web sites. Using students’ stored preferences and previous coursework, for example, a custom-made engine might suggest classes to take and allow users to share their recommendations with others. That idea represents a way to potentially streamline the hassles of the course registration ritual, he suggested.

Interesting.

What about using some of this data to build a delicious-like web based catalog/search of courses, where students could tag and evaluate the courses they take and share this information with their peers? You know, some kind of social course cataloging.

What do you think?

To celebrate Thanksgiving with all this blog readers based in the US, I’ve prepared a selection of YouTube videos featuring 10 college/university presidents in unusual situations — i.e. they don’t give a speech or read a welcome message.

Here are the 10 university/colleges presidents listed by order of appearance:

• Allegheny College President, Dr. Richard Cook, on a motorcycle
• Butte College President, Dr. Diana Van Der Ploeg, throwing the first pitch of a baseball game
• Malone College President, Dr. Gary Streit, featured in a fun spot about the football season
• Oakwood College President, Dr. Delbert Baker, taking a dive in the swimming pool WITH his business suit to honor a promise
• Portsmouth Ohio SSU President Dr. Rita Rice Morris parachuting from a plane
• Coastal Carolina University President, David DeCenzo wearing his university mascot’s head
• Bible College President, Dr. Mike Randall, wearing a fake mustache
• Dickinson College President, Dr. William G. Durden, demonstrating how to tie a bowtie
• Xavier University President, Father Michael Graham, answering questions during a student-run late-night comedy TV show
• Upper Iowa University President, Dr. Alan Walker, getting his head shave in public

In this selection, some videos are a bit longish, so feel free to watch the beginning and skip to the next one by clicking on the right arrow on the YouTube screen.

I’ve been trying for a while now to get in touch with the person in charge of higher education partnership at YouTube . So, when I saw that Obadiah Greenberg – who used to work at UC Berkeley – was scheduled to give a presentation at a conference in San Diego last week, I ask one of my favorite higher ed bloggers, Deanna Wolf, (who was attending this conference in sunny California) if she could prepare a short report about this talk for all of us. Here’s what Deanna emailed me yesterday.

On Friday, Nov. 9, Obadiah “Tarzan” Greenberg (Yes, that really is his middle name) took the floor during the Stamats “Generating Successful Interactive Marketing Strategies Conference” in San Diego. A former Web staffer at University of California-Berkeley, Obadiah now has a Web 2.0 dream job of being the go-between for YouTube with higher ed institutions.

Obadiah opened with a bit of history on YouTube for those of us who know the name, but may not know the story behind it:

* Launched in December 2005 as a way to share videos between friends and family, now a worldwide phenomenon
* 3 million videos watched a day
* 8,000 videos uploaded daily
* It is a community in control, with users having the power to comment on and rate videos
* YouTube’s audience is split fairly evenly between the genders and age groups
* Of the hardcore YouTube watchers, 80 percent are young males
* Most find YouTube videos through friend recommendations and online searches
* The vision of YouTube is to entertain, inform and empower through videos

He then shared some stats about how YouTube is really part of the Web 2.0/technology-infused culture that’s changing the way we get entertainment and live:

* The average person now spends equal time online as she/he does watching TV
* 143 million Americans have bought mobile devices in the past few years
* 11 percent plan to buy a digital video camera in the next year
* 79 percent of online video watchers connect via broadband

Obadiah then talked about the University of California-Berkeley, which was the first to launch an enhanced channel on YouTube back at the beginning of October, which was migrated over from Google video. Contents include actual course lectures, campus events, and campus life videos (see more at youtube.com/ucberkeley). The site has had visitors from across the U.S., India, Canada, Italy, China, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia and more. During this time, Obadiah said they’ve had 150 comments on the main page, and have only had to delete 4. It’s a self-regulating community — any out-of-line negative comments are usually drowned out by supporters who ask, “Why you hating?”

In Obadiah’s view, there are two main ways that higher ed institutions can work with YouTube:

Marketing/PR — Content is special events, tours and athletics, fed to audiences of alumni and prospective students, with the benefits of promotion and monetization.
Education — Content is full courses and other learning/training objectives, fed to audiences of alumni, prospective students, current student, faculty, researchers and self-learners, with the benefits of education and promotion, too.

Obadiah’s practical YouTube advice is for anyone considering making YouTube videos or launching channels to bring together staff players with the video producers and think about all your audiences to determine content (which could be lectures, events, news, tours, sports, training, ceremonies, and campus ads).

To build your audiences, he offers this advice: be real, be consistent, and be interesting.

Obadiah’s presentation was all of those things, in my opinion, and I highly recommend anyone who has a chance to see him speak, do so.

And D.W.’s last words of advice: next time your boss catches you on YouTube at work, remember to say you’re doing “research.”

This has been a busy week in the social networking website world. Last Monday, a few days before the launch of the new Facebook features, Yahoo! launched a new social networking website targeted to college students and alums: Kickstart.

Scott Gatz, Senior Director of Yahoo’s Advanced Products, manages the Kickstart’s team. Despite a busy week, Scott has taken the time to answer a few questions about this new website just for you (read the end of the interview for more information about the $25,000).

1) Your team has just launched Kickstart, a new social networking website for college students and alums. What makes Kickstart different from (better than?) Facebook, Linkedin or MySpace?

Kickstart is a professional network with a purpose: to build a community of college students, recent grads, professionals and alumni where people connect and discover the right internships, jobs, career advice and mentorship. We started by doing a lot of research with college students and found that while they are very networked on sites like Facebook, those networks are mostly of friends and primarily about fun. Kickstart offers a place to have a professional profile, so they don’t have to worry about potential employers poking around their private profile. On the other hand, services like LinkedIn are good for people with an existing professional network. Kickstart is designed to help students and recent grads, who do not have an established professional network, discover the latent connections or “weak-ties” they already have but may not be aware of with professionals, managers and companies – these weak ties extend beyond simply being alumni from the same school and could include having been in the same fraternities/sororities, from the same home-town, etc.

2) Higher ed institutions have started to use the main social networking websites as communication channels with their students and alums. Will Kickstart offer any special opportunities to universities/colleges or alum associations?

We’re still early in the development of Kickstart and we expect to add a number of features. Each company, school and association has a page on Kickstart for all of its members. You could imagine that these pages will be terrific places for message boards, bulletins, events and other ways to connect people. For now, we’re listening to people’s feedback on the site, and we’d love to hear from you about which features you think should be first.

3) Do you have any plans to offer an API so higher ed web developers can create their own applications on the top of Kickstart?

The web is moving towards openness in everything, and it is pretty common these days for Yahoo services to have open APIs (see the Yahoo! Developer Network). With Kickstart, we are very focused on creating a community where alums and students can connect and the features we will do first are driven by that. In time, I do expect we’ll offer more and more ways for higher education to participate. I recommend that people sign up on the site and connect with others to see what the potential is and then drop us feedback so we know where to focus.

Last point: we want to encourage alumni to sign up for the site in advance of students. To “kickstart” that effort, we’re offering $25,000 to the school with the most alumni signed up by 12/31/07. I’d suggest that people take a minute to pass this onto former students and alums to take advantage.

That’s the big question of the day with the launch of Facebook pages, a new feature of the popular social networking website introduced to Facebook users this morning on the company blog:

You now have a way to connect with things you are passionate about. We’ve launched Facebook Pages, which are distinct, customized profiles designed for businesses, bands, celebrities and more to represent themselves on Facebook.

And, here is how the new feature was introduced to businesses and other organizations now welcome (profiles have been reserved to individuals since the beginning) to “establish an interactive presence on Facebook:”

Every Facebook Page is a unique experience where users can become more deeply connected with your business or brand. Users can express their support by adding themselves as a fan, writing on your Wall, uploading photos, and joining other fans in discussion groups. You can send updates to your fans regularly — or just with special news or offers. Add applications to your Page and engage your users with videos, reviews, flash content, and more. Creating a Facebook Page is easy, free, and great for all types of businesses,

There is a dedicated category for Education, so universities and colleges are definitely welcome as well.

Shelley Keith, Website Coordinator at Southern Arkansas University (who is also a regular reader of this blog) emailed me about the news this morning and hasn’t wasted any time. She has already put together this Facebook page for her university (she plans to share her experience in creating this page in a future blog post – I’ll post the link when it becomes available):

What looks interesting – besides the fact that it doesn’t cost a penny to create such a page – is that they come with a free service of very promising stats, Facebook Insights:

With Facebook Insights, you have access to data on activity, fan demographics, ad performance, and trends. With this information, you are better equipped to improve your custom content on Facebook and adjust your ad targeting. Facebook Insights is a free service for all Facebook Pages and Social Ads.

It was just launched today, so it’s definitely very early to decide if this is something your institution should do. However, since it just takes a few minutes to create a basic Facebook page, it’s probably wiser to set one up for your school.

Again, my dear readers, what do you think?

Would you share your crisis ‘lite’ website homepage with your colleagues in higher education?

Since the Virginia Tech Tragedy, we all have been building/updating the web template to be used in case of a crisis or an emergency.

By nature, these web templates can’t be easily shared among different institutions. You don’t want the general public to stumble on these by mistake.

So, I got an idea that I shared with the members of Higher Ed Experts this morning.

This online community is only open to people working in universities and colleges (not a member yet, sign up at www.higheredexperts.com/register), so it would be very easy to create a password-protected gallery listing crisis/emergency web templates from different institutions.

The gallery will only be viewable by registered members. The goal is to build a useful tool for everybody looking for some benchmarking data.

Duke University and Kingsborough Community College (CUNY) have already agreed to share their web page template.

If you’d like to and can share a link to yours (I could also host a copy of your HTML files at www.higheredexperts.com – again only available to members), please send me an email at karine@higheredexperts.com.

I met Jeff Kraus, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Public Relations at the Virginia Community College System, last June at the conference his organization held for Web and PR folks working in VA community colleges. I was invited to present at this conference by Susan Hayden, a regular reader. At that time, I spoke about Web 2.0, blogs and social networking websites (Check out the presentation slides in PDF). Two months ago, Jeff and his team launched a blog of their own, VA Higher Ed (while I did some minor consulting work on another VCCS internal blog, I haven’t had any part in VA Higher Ed). Today, they are still blogging and this blog is getting better and better.

1) You and your team started to blog at “VA Higher Ed” a couple of months ago. Why did you start this blog? What are its goals and its audience(s)?

We are breaking new ground with this blog, especially from the perspective of the Virginia Community College System. The blog is big piece of a larger effort we have made to update and improve our website.

We serve 240,000 students and our workforce services train an additional 190,000 people each year. Those record-setting figures are driven by students between the ages of 17 and 21. Knowing that, we have to respond to it and find ways to get on the radar screens of people in that age bracket. They don’t necessarily read the newspaper. They don’t necessarily listen to local radio stations. They don’t necessarily watch local network television. But, study after study shows they are on-line. They are participating in social networking opportunities and they are posting and/or reading on blogs.

From becoming a race car driver to a video game designer to having a guaranteed way to transfer to the four-year college or university of their choice – the VCCS has a lot to offer these folks. And, the blog is one way to reach them.

The blog is also meeting some of our communication needs within our system. As the focal point of legislative relation efforts, our system needed a way to more rapidly relay information during the legislative session and receive feedback on it. The VCCS had previously done that through a weekly email.

Our efforts face some internal skepticism. Some question the value of a blog as part of a larger communications effort. So we have to show them that it can be more than a partisan politics food fight or a virtual dark alley where people anonymously throw daggers at each other – a perception that some non-bloggers have about the blogosphere as a whole.

2) This blog is written by a team. Why did you choose to do it this way?

As a blog reader, I know that it’s rare to have a team of people driving a blog. But I am a fan of two team-written blogs, unrelated to higher education, and I’ve really enjoyed the dynamic they create as a group. We are lucky to have interesting people who each have a unique set of experiences, focus and voice. We are still new and learning – and probably always will be with this – and I hope to offer readers something special through the synergy of these folks.

3) You worked as a journalist before joining VCCS. In your opinion, what’s the main difference between a news report and a blog post?

The biggest difference between reporting and blogging is that I now pursue an agenda. That’s something I purposefully didn’t do as a reporter. I believe in the transformative power of higher education and I believe our community colleges are an essential part of the success we seek for our communities and the individuals who live there. This blog gives us a way to promote that – to really illustrate to people how we see the dots connecting between our colleges and their future success.

My sixth UB column for 2007 is now available in the November issue (it was scheduled for the December issue, but apparently my editor couldn’t wait for an extra month — maybe, it’s because it’s especially good ;-) as well as online: “10 Steps to Better Blogs”

This article is a good summary of the presentation I gave at HighEdWebDev in Rochester a few weeks ago.

If you are a University Business reader who has just discovered collegewebeditor.com, welcome! Don’t forget to subscribe to this blog via RSS or email.

If you have any questions or feedback about the blog or the column, feel free to email me at karine@collegewebeditor.com .

Benchmarking is the name of the game in higher education. No matter the type of projects you plan to work on, you (or your boss) will always need to see what’s done in others institutions.

Website (re)designs are no exception to this rule, and that’s why eduStyle, the website that aims to provide inspiration for campus web designers has become such a great resource for anybody involved in higher ed web design.

I had the pleasure to meet the man behind eduStyle, Stewart Foss, at HighEdWebDev in Rochester earlier this month. Manager of Web Services at Grant MacEwan College, Stewart was working at that time on the redesign of eduStyle, a redesign he launched a few days ago. So, it was the perfect timing for an interview.

1) When did you launch EduStyle? What was your goal at the time?

Sometime back in 2005 I began printing screenshots of college and university websites that I liked and posting them to the side of a bookshelf next to my cubicle under the label “Sites that don’t totally suck” (because every site has a little bit of suckiness – we all have a rogue department using a 1996 design). Every few weeks someone from my 3 person web team would print out a site that they liked and stick it to the bookshelf. The major problem that drove me crazy was that there was no easy way to find the good ones. I would often scroll down the listings of schools randomly clicking and hoping that one would catch my attention.
It was not very effective, so it didn’t take long to realize that it was time to have a higher-ed focused web design gallery. I started to get serious about the idea in the late summer of 2006. To be honest I wasn’t sure how many good websites would come through the door, so to test the waters I sent out a request for submission to uwebd and received well over 50 in the first hour. Based on that I decided to go for it. My main goal was to build a community of people who could share high quality examples of higher-ed web design. I also wanted an easy way to track redesigns and popular trends. It took a few months of evenings and weekend work on the site to pull it all together. The site went live on January 24, 2007.

BEFORE

AFTER

2) How many registered members does the website have?

As I write this the site has 471 registered members. The total number of users and top users are listed on the users page of the site.

3) With your website, you get a chance to review the latest redesigned websites and monitor the design preferences of the higher ed web professionals. What are the main current trends in higher ed web design?

The vast majority of the sites that come in are built up using 3 horizontal stripes of content. The top stripe is generally filled with the branding and the universal site navigation (quicklinks, search box, portal link, etc.). The second strip is the visual piece. It contains the “featured content” and the primary site navigation. The third stripe is the primary content area. This is usually divided into at least 3 columns which include welcome text, news, events, more featured content, or additional navigation. There are several examples of this style of site:

• Cornell University
• Biola University
• Biola University Undergrad Admissions
• Notre Dame
• University of Miami – College of Arts and Sciences
• Ball State

The other interesting trend to watch is the sliding doors of content. You can see this style on the following sites:

• Brown University
• Boston University

I am starting to find more sites that break out of the 800×600 box and more and more are using flash and video content more liberally. I am also glad to say I am seeing lots of sites that are not afraid to use colors other than the school colors. And, of course, AJAX.

The University of Missouri-Rolla will change its name in 2 months, on January 1st, 2008.

Officially started in January this year and supported by a dedicated blog, the transition to the new name, Missouri S&T, starts a new stage today with the launch of a new website “Hello, My Name is Missouri S&T” as announced in the official press release:

The university’s “hello” website , which launches on Thursday, Nov. 1, features video clips of UMR students, alumni, faculty and staff introducing themselves on camera. The subjects say “I am Missouri S&T” on camera – or, for videos of groups, “We are Missouri S&T.”
[...]
Students, alumni, faculty and staff are encouraged to submit their homemade videos to the site. The videos may be as simple or as elaborate as individuals wish to make them. The main requirement is that the videos include the phrase “I am Missouri S&T.” Videos from student groups, departments and other groups are also welcome.

The goal is definitely to get the whole UMR Missouri S&T community excited about the name change.

More than 20 short videos shot by the university mascot (Joe Miner), students, staff and faculty members are already available on this new website, but I didn’t see any video shotincluding one by Andrew Careaga, UMR/MST Communication Director, yet.