Top 2016 Fishy April Fools’ Day #highered Website Homepages & #hesm Stories

April 1st, 2016 Karine Joly 13 Comments

We can all use a little bit a lightness and creativity, right?

Day in, day out, many digital marketers and social media professionals rely on tricks to play with our emotions online — to get our attention, to get us engaged or to get us to buy something.

On April Fools’ Day, things are a bit different as the emotional center of our brain gets a break from all these marketing tactics and its rational, thinking part becomes the target.

In higher education, there’s so much creativity that we often get amazing stories out of this day.

So, here’s a compilation of the ones I’ve found the most interesting, funny and creative.

UF-FSU Merger

Big rival schools decide to merge – what could go wrong?

UF-FSU1

UF-FSU2

The University of (Harry) Rochester

A sorting hat quiz to find your house, athletics and research at Rochwarts.

UR1

Oberlin K-6 College

A great photo essay of non-college-aged college students.

oberlin

VCU: Tats instead of SATs

A new kind of admissions requirement – personally, I’ll go to the other school as I’m not found of any needles ;-)

VCU

Dome-less Augustana College

Who moved their dome?

augustana

Retiring UMN Mascot

Family first! Sometimes retiring is the best option — even for Mascots.

umn

Hands-on Learning at UVic in Canada

UVicAprilFool

What did I miss?

Have you noticed any other good ones? Please post a comment with a link so we can check them out!

13 Responses

  1. bwasson says:

    Proud to have been part of the team that worked on the new premier gossip, celebrity and subscription service for @SJCNY: SJCPrime. The hottest news on and off campus >> http://sjcny.edu/sjcprime

  2. John Kotarski says:

    Here’s one: http://www.marywood.edu

    Take your hand off your mouse and wait a few seconds… effect stops when you mouse the page back (do this multiple times)

  3. @_mhenderson Thanks for the shoutout! We definitely had fun building that one out.

  4. Meg Hartman says:

    We’ve got something mysterious lurking in the pond water at Roberts Wesleyan college… https://www.roberts.edu/ and Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iCIoyrZ9Mc&feature=youtu.be

  5. Robert Fuste says:

    We had fun putting together our April Fool’s this year: http://www.andrews.edu

  6. We had many believe that UNH was part of the Harry Potter world.

  7. We had many beliveing that UNH was a part of the Harry Potter world. bit.ly/unh-harrypotter

  8. Champlain revamped their website – take a “peep”: http://ow.ly/10lYFy

  9. John Roushkolb says:

    Park decided to move a Carnegie Library building.

    http://www.park.edu/news/2016/04/afd-2016.html

Got a question or comment?