Current Students

I know this is a very long title for a short post, but what I can say…

Last week Fortune released its list of the smartest people in tech in several categories.

Dr danah boyd, who will present an online master class about the social media practices of young adults this Thursday for Higher Ed Experts, was nominated the smartest academic in Tech.

The smartest people in tech – Smartest Academic: danah boyd – FORTUNE

So, this online master class is your chance to listen to the smartest academic in tech this week.
Registration are open until tomorrow (July 13) end of the day at www.higheredexperts.com/socialmedia

I don’t know why but I just love lipdubs. I guess this kind of one-take online videos is powerful as it captures pretty well the energy and preparation that goes into these productions.

Anyway, I stumbled upon Calvin College lipdub last week as it was posted to an email listserv I follow (see not everything HAS to happen on Twitter these days ;-) by someone working at the college. At the date of this writing, the video got more than 18,000 views and more than a hundred comments with some interesting discussion going on.

Haven’t watched it yet? Go for it, there are really some golden nuggets in this video:

LipDub at Calvin College from Rachel Kuyvenhoven on Vimeo.

The video was entirely produced by a team of 3 Calvin College students, Kristin Crawford, Josh Schroyer, and Rachel Kuyvenhoven, who answered a few of my questions via email last Friday:

1) Why did you decide to do the lipdub? Did you work with the college?

We saw the original university lipdub by students at the Hochschule Furtwangen University in Germany, and we were inspired! We wanted to make our own lipdub because we thought it would be a new challenge and a lot of fun. The project was done completely by students, and it was not for a class or for credit. However, we did get some support from the college in order to make it, since we needed permission for filming and equipment to use.

Tell us a bit more on how you did it?

We chose the song, planned the route for the video, and then planned all the choreography for each section. We did a lot of practice takes in order to know exactly how each section would look.
The majority of the preproduction time was spent on organization and logistics. We held casting auditions and then promoted the project in other ways to get more students involved. We first started planning in January, and then we worked on choreography from February to April, with the filming happening at the end of April. The production took three hours, and we did five takes of the video.

Any tips/lessons learned you could share with students/staff members who would like to do a lipdub at their college/university?

Our tip is that the more that you do ahead of time, the smoother the filming will be. We spent hours on preproduction, and as a result the production took only three hours.
With videos like this, there’s always the issue of music permission.
The music is so integral to the video, so it’s important to search for the right song. But it’s also important to consider the legal use of music. We sent in music requests from the start when we first began the project, and we are continuing to do so.

I stumbled on the UBC Admin Blog thanks to Martine Lafleur who shared its link on Twitter.

Yesterday, I took the time to explore this recently launched group blog aimed at enabling further dialogue between senior administration and students at the University of British Columbia.

While president blogs have been around for some time (President Michael Crow from ASU was one of the trailblazers, President John Meada at RISD has also been doing a great job at blogging), I hadn’t come across a blog by senior administrators that hold as many promises as the UBC Admin Blog (Well, Joe Hice’s Hice School is also a great blog, but I’ll put it in another category as Joe is a communicator by trade).

Frankly, what I found really surprising and interesting in the UBC Admin Blog was to find UBC VP of Finance, Resources, and Operations among the bloggers.

In those tough budget times in higher education, it’s pretty rare to see the people in charge of budget cuts get up front and personal to try to initiate open dialogue with students and other constituents.

The UBC Admin Blog — The administration connecting with students online.

Anyway, here are a few things UBC is doing right with this blog:

• A short video introduction from each blogger on the About page of the blog.
  It helps put a face on a name and can also help promote civility by reminding readers they are interacting with real human beings.

  Here’s the video introduction from Pierre Ouillet, the Finance VP.

• A great moderation policy highlighting in plain English what is ok and what is not when it comes to comments and available from one of the top navigation tabs of the blog.
  
• A conversational tone as shown in the first post written by Ouillet, From transparency to dialogue, and the direct reply to the comment of an international student about budget on his second post.

What do YOU think? Has your institution done something similar? Let us know by posting a comment!

Web professionals have always frown upon the use of PDF as the online version of a print newsletter or magazine.

For some publication officers and college magazine editors, PDF is an easy way to provide the online version of their hard print work.

Just take the final file from the designer (PDF has been used for proofs for many years), have it uploaded to the web server and… voila!

According to The State of Print and Electronic Publications in Higher Ed, a survey completed by 198 professionals last year, PDF is the format of choice for the electronic version of the main magazine in 38% of the cases as shown below.

• PDF file of the print magazine: 38%
• Website powered by content management system: 21%
• Email newsletter: 18%
• Flash-based flipping-through digital magazine: 12%
• Website powered by a blogging platform: 6%
• Other: 4%

Even if the practice is quick and cost-effective, it has been proven by many usability studies that PDF isn’t a user-friendly format for people browsing on computers. These files were also problematic for search optimization as their content was not indexed by search engines in the past – but this isn’t the case anymore.

Yet, in web circles, PDF still has a bad vibe. No respectable web professional wants to see PDF used on web servers for anything except maybe for official forms that needs to be printed.

While I still think web versions of print magazines or other publications are a better way to cater to readers using a computer or even a smartphone (or a pocket sized web mobile device like the iPod Touch), I can’t help think it won’t be the case for ebook readers or tablets – especially when these new “reading” devices are going to get a big push from students looking for a better text book solution.

So, what should a college magazine or publication officer do?

Adopt a multichannel approach: develop a real online version and keep the PDF version for print publications – even if they end up not printing them anymore in the future.

What do YOU think?

It looks like the incredible success of the lipdub produced by students from UQAM in Montreal, QC (more than 2.5 million views as of this writing) has pushed some institutions in the US to finally join the university lipdub movement.

Texas State University in San Marcos did its lipdub on November 8th in the LBJ Students Center with about 30 students. Lisa Duncan, University Marketing videographer was behind the camera.

Twitter / kymfox: @TXSt students are doing a lipdub

The lipdub is available on Vimeo:

Texas State University – San Marcos Lipdub

There is also an interesting making of produced by the University Star, the student newspaper, on YouTube:

At the other side of the country, in Boston, Suffolk University students got their lipdub done on November 11th with about 50 of them and the help of the university communications office. They used a mash-up of songs from Queen for the music – a first for University lipdubs.

Jessica Krywosa, director of Web Communications at Suffolk, shared the link to this lipdub yesterday over Twitter and was kind enough to answer a few questions about it via email.

Twitter / Jessica Krywosa: Suffolk University Lip Dub …

1) How did the Office of University Communications work with student organizations? Did the students have full creative control?

We reached out through the student activities office on campus who worked with student groups to find interested parties. We also reached out via Facebook and Twitter to any student on campus. There was combined control: students had input on everything from the song chosen to the choreography and characters.

2) How many students took part in the lipdub and how long did the project take?
50 students and staff members participated. It took 6 weeks of work and 4 hours of work. It was shot on November 11th in three takes.

3) Why did the Office of University Communications decide to support the project and host it on its YouTube channel – which is a first?

The Comm office is the centralized office for all university social media efforts. We drive the strategy for the university brand in all instances, including online. The Comm office created an integrated social media strategy and therefore uses ‘their’ channels as the ‘Official University’ channels. We do not own the channel from an office standpoint but as a repository for collaboration: we channel all university video content there for greater reach. Same for our Flickr, Facebook and Twitter accounts, instead of segmenting it as ‘our’ office channel, we created it for everyone to supply content to and create a community around.

4) What is your take on the issue of copyright for the music? Is it the reason why you used a “mash-up”?

What we produced is a mash-up and we hope that it produces a greater interest in Queen and in Suffolk University but we certainly understand the limitations of the digital millennium copyright act. We could be asked to remove it. We aren’t charging for this content or using it for commercial purposes. As with all of the university lip dubs, they used copyrighted music (Black Eyed Peas, Thriller, etc) and are still on YouTube today.

While doing my research yesterday on YouTube, I stumbled upon the following 4 new university lipdubs of interest produced in the past few weeks in Japan (as an homage to the one done by UQAM students), in Quebec and in South Africa.

This year, several institutions have chosen to produce special videos to welcome freshmen on campus.

I’ve already written about “It’s Your Turn” from Missouri S&T, but today I’d like to share the video from Imperial College London in the UK.

At 3 minutes and 36 seconds, this video does a great job at presenting the institution, its history (that part actually is reminiscent of Missouri S&T video’s treatment), its academic programs, facilities and even main research projects.

So, just take the time to watch it, it’s really worth it.

This video was created and produced by Pamela Agar’s team at Imperial College. Pamela and her team members answered the following questions to give you a behind-the-scenes look.

1) What are the goal and target audience of this video? Why did you choose a video to reach this target audience?

At the start of each academic year, all new students attend presentations on their first day where senior staff and student representatives welcome them to Imperial and introduce the College. The staff involved in these presentations felt that they could be more fun and engaging, and so we were asked to produce a short film to open the presentations in an informative but unusual way.

We didn’t need to “sell” Imperial’s facilities to this audience of Freshers (Karine’s note: freshmen as we would say in the US) – they’ve already made the decision to come. So the film was much more about instilling a feeling of pride in our new students. We wanted to grab their attention and make them feel excited about the institution they are now part of. The scope of the film was vast – we were asked to try and cover the College’s history, past and present achievements and what new students can expect – all in less than four minutes! But using video and animation meant we could cover a lot visually as well as using the script.

2) How long did it take you to produce the video from start to finish? Can you describe a bit what kind of effort went into it?

From start to finish, we produced this in 2 weeks. After several initial brainstorms about how to approach the project, it took a couple of days to write and rewrite the script until it was short enough, without losing the desired content and messages. We also spent a day lining up the locations on campus, writing up the filming schedule and ensuring we had three students to star in the films – we used students in the College’s drama society. The film shoot itself took 1 day, and the video production team of two spent 3-4 days in post production. Our web designer developed the intro and in-video gfx and sound over 5-6 days.

In all, five people worked on the project – although not full time over the two weeks.

3) What tools (software, camera, etc.) did you use to create this video?

For the film elements, we used a Sony DVCAM and edited using Media100. Our web designer produced the graphics in Photoshop and Illustrator. The animations were programmed in Flash, exported as mov with embedded alpha channel. The “large” animation of the zooming map was done in After Effects. Sounds were then edited in WaveLab. All elements were assembled in Premiere and exported as one large mov.

4) Any interesting lessons learned in this project you’d like to share with the community?

I asked around the team about this question and one thing they said was that they found that Flash is a great tool for programming animations. The code can be easily re-used for any kind of object which in turn speeds up the production process when having to create loads of animations that follow the same pattern. And a technical thing they reported was that exporting from Flash with embedded alpha channel only works if the file format is QuickTime.

On a more general level, my (very obvious) lesson is don’t leave things to the last minute! We had a very busy summer producing a number of other projects, so left producing this Start of Session video until just a couple of weeks before the deadline. Leaving it until during the Summer vacation also meant it was harder to find students to star in the film as most were away from campus – we were very lucky we managed to find a great trio.

We didn’t leave much contingency time in case things went wrong, and so when our web designer came down with flu just as he was about to start work on the graphics almost ruined the project. Thankfully he managed to complete the project from his sick bed – that’s dedication!

Isn’t this headline quite a teaser?

I stand by it though as this is also a good way to look at the Edu Blogger Scholarship Contest.

As I’ve explained on this blog a few weeks ago, I’m managing this contest targeted to edu bloggers. It’s open to the “usual suspects” of the higher ed blogosphere (you know who you are – and if you aren’t registered yet, hope you’ll do it before the deadline next Tuesday), but also to any of the bloggers writing for your institution.

The only 3 requirements to enter this contest are 1) to write a post about online education or education online, 2) to include the contest badge in the entry and 3) to fill out the form available on the contest page.

While the contest is sponsored by Online College, a website about online education, these posts written for the contest don’t even have to be in favor of online education – and can also help promote what’s going on at YOUR institution.

• If your student bloggers think that studying on campus is the only way to get an education, they can discuss their opinion in their contest post.
• If some of your faculty bloggers teach online classes at your institution and want to write about their experience in a post, they can enter the contest.
• If some of your staff members passionate about academic technology want to blog about the future of education in this online world, they can submit an entry for the contest as well.

What I’m trying to say is that there is plenty that can be written about education online or online education, and I’m sure the folks blogging for your institution would love to get an opportunity to win one of the 3 scholarships.

Think it’s not even worth trying because of the numbers of A-list bloggers already entered in the contest?
Even if I find it hard to understand, as of this writing, we only have a dozen entries – which means that with 3 prizes to win, any interested edu blogger has a very high probability (we’re not even talking about chances) to grab at least $500.

I know most edu bloggers don’t do it for the money (hey, if we were we would be blogging about something else), but I would really love to see a bit more entries for this contest, you know, just to keep things interesting for the jury.

So, go read the rules on the Edu Blogger Scholarship Contest page. Share this post with your bloggers or go write your own entry if you’re a blogger.

The deadline is next Tuesday – March 17.

Unless you were already on vacations or enjoying your office holiday party, you’ve probably heard about what some (and according to my sources, Andrew Careaga was the first to coin that term) have called “FacebookGate”

A few days before Christmas, Brad Ward uncovered, on his blog, a scheme perpetuated by College Prowler and another company to create hundreds (more than 300 according to Brad’s research) of Facebook “Class of 2013″ groups under false pretense and using some trademarked material (logo, name, etc.)

A lot has been written about the topic, but it looks like things have settled down on the Facebook front thanks to Brad and the community – some “fake” groups were deleted by Facebook itself, and it seems like others have been handed over to legitimate admins, i.e real admitted students of the Class of 2013.

But, the biggest lesson in the wake of this FacebookGate is just a reminder:
Institutions can’t control everything – especially when using a third-party website like Facebook.

Good news is that alternatives (some almost free, others a bit more expensive) to Facebook are available if your institution want to interact with prospective, admitted or current students in a controlled environment.

Mark Greenfield (UB), Mike Caulfield (MIT OpenCourseWare) and Adam Stahr (UNL) will share winning strategies, good tips and practical advice on how to use these alternatives – including the NING platform available for free – in a 3-webinar series scheduled next week (Jan 13-15, 2009).

Webinars: Higher Ed Experts

The goal of this series – that was scheduled before the FacebookGate story broke – is to help you evaluate and create a private social networking website, the perfect solution if all the media attention around the Facebook groups has scared your boss or your Admissions folks.

I’ve just postponed the registration deadline for this series to this Friday – January 9, 2009 at 9PM ET.

You can find out more about Social Networks MBA, this 3-webinar series, and secure your spot (places are limited) by visiting www.higheredexperts.com/socialnetworksmba

Questions? Just email karine@collegewebeditor.com

After blogs yesterday, today is the turn of email.

This week, I guess I’m on a mission to rescue you from the sirens of the lost technologies casting the premature death of very good marketing/communication channels with great proven return on investment.

So, let me put it this way right from the get-go: email isn’t dead.

Email marketing is still very relevant in higher education especially in these difficult economic times where ROI is going to become even more important.

At one condition though, you got to do it right.

Both speakers from the upcoming Email Marketing 360 webinar series, Karlyn Morissette (Dartmouth) and Carmella Manges (St Edward’s University) have been very successful with their respective email marketing strategies and agreed to share their expertise and experience with you just after Thanksgiving on December 2nd and 3rd.

Interested? Intrigued?
Keep reading the description of this 2-webinar series below.

Already sold on the idea?
Register by November 19 at www.higheredexperts.com/emailmarketing360.
At only $240, the total cost per connection for both webinars (you can stuff a room with people from all your offices on campus) is quite budget-friendly.

“Email Marketing 360″ is a 2-webinar series that will show you that email is far from dead – even for communications targeted to younger audiences – when done right. You will learn why and how to set up an email marketing strategy for your office, department or institution. You will also find out how to make sure you measure the ROI of your campaigns.

December 2, 2008 1PM-2PM ET – Rain date: December 9, 2008 1PM-2PM ET
Marketing to Inboxes: 5-Step Plan to Effective Email Campaigns
Karlyn Morissette, Web Producer at Dartmouth, will guide you on the road to successful email marketing campaigns. She will explain why and how email can help you get your message across, recruit more students or generate more gifts by following her 5-step plan.

December 3, 2008 1PM-2PM ET – Rain date: December 10, 2008 1PM-2PM ET
Analyze this! How to inform your email marketing strategy with the right analytics
Carmella Manges, Director of E-Marketing at St. Edward’s University, will explain how the right approach with analytics can help you show the ROI of your campaigns and fine tune your email marketing strategy. She will share best practices and lessons learned in implementing a complete email analytics program for her institution.

For registration and information, just go to www.higheredexperts.com/emailmarketing360.

Since we had to postpone to January 13-15, 2009 the series initially scheduled this week, Social Networks MBA, you can still get a $25 Amazon certificate if you register for both series. More details about this offer can be found on this previous post. I’ve already issued a few gift certificates for registered folks.

Got questions? Email karine@collegewebeditor.com

My fifth UB column for 2008 is now available in the October issue as well as online: “It’s The Community, Stupid! A seven-step plan to raise and nurture any community online.”

This column is the written version of the closing keynote I gave at eduWeb last July, a live presentation that also included videos from 3 community managers working in higher ed institutions.

If you’re interested in more tips and tricks to manage your online communities and social networks, you should also consider attending “Social Networks MBA: How to Develop and Nurture a Thriving Community,” a 3-webinar series scheduled on November 11, 12 and 13, 2008 January 13, 14 & 15, 2009 (the series has been postponed).

For more information and to register by November 3rd December 19, 2008, just visit www.higheredexperts.com/socialnetworksmba.

By the way, 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.