Higher Ed Web 3009

(Originally posted in November 2009)

I just returned from the annual HighEdWeb conference in Milwaukee. You may have caught the online buzz around the conference as both ‘harsh tagging’ and ‘tweckling’ became new verbs thanks to a rather unfortunate key note speaker. Key take away from that experience is that you need to really analyze your audience and figure out a way to incorporate your audience’s social tendencies. That said, this conference is a tremendous grassroots gathering organized by a board of volunteers from a broad range of colleges and universities. About 400 people attended, the vast majority of whom work in an academic setting, supporting and building a broad range of online tools, applications and sites.

Three critical themes came up consistently across presentations, conversations, and hallway chats:

• Students and prospective students have increasingly sophisticated technology expectations; yet colleges are well behind meeting the needs of five years ago.
• A large percentage of faculty members are retiring, opening up slots for younger and more tech savvy replacements. This is creating further strain on limited resources.
• Because of the transparency of the online space, much more brand development work is being done.

A few colleges and universities shared some really exciting concepts and thoughts around each of these themes.

Student Expectations
Many presenters and participants were very passionate in saying that they’re trying to serve 21st century expectations at institutions that really don’t get it. One presenter mentioned that the head of his development office was concerned that students were spending more time social networking with people off campus than relating to their peer students and wondered what the future held for their loyalty. A few great examples of schools that ‘get it’ and have reaped tremendous results:

• Carleton College – they went through a huge discovery process and built a whole new admissions site on a Reason.com platform. It’s like a virtual tour in that you get to really know about 12 – 15 students, get the real story about their campus and environment, etc. It includes videos, pictures, text, audio, etc. They spent six months in discovery including wireframe testing with perspective students… and a month building.
• Ithaca College – built out a ‘private Facebook’ for the class of 2013 on social engine. They knew that if they could get classmates introduced and feeling comfortable they were more likely to enroll. Facebook itself was an issue because it is so public and you don’t know if people are really part of a group or not. And faculty would NOT participate in Facebook. This interaction resulted in a much higher matriculation rate from admitted students than in recent years.

Faculty Needs
Generally speaking, the faculty is aging rather rapidly and the old boomer guard is retiring. The younger ones have very different expectations for their online tools:

• Blackboard, or the open source Moodle, is simply not optional. Every college has a system for faculty to publish notes and assignments, prepare lectures, students to submit papers, discussion threads, etc. Occasionally this system is linked to email and calendaring and general campus news as a Portal, but often not. Ithaca College mentioned that their biggest challenge with their ‘Facebook’ app was transitioning ‘friends’ to the everyone’s MyIthaca portal. Others were amazed that they even had that…
• Stanford is rebuilding many of their department pages to allow faculty to blog, post articles and symposium notes, and interact more with other faculty around the world.
• There is also a small liberal arts college in Maine that is starting to build a huge interactive presence to continue blackboard / course conversations over multiple years if not decades. This would include pulling in what we’d think of as alumni newsletters to an ongoing dialog.

Branding
Any number of presenters made fun of the ‘sameness’ that permeates most college home pages and admissions sites. The first day key note speaker really hit home with dozens of home pages that show a girl under a tree. Schools in warm climates even use palm trees!
The internal group at the University of Chicago gave an excellent presentation on how their creative group and web services groups work together. They described how

hey selected their color palate and fonts to reflect their color (red), their campus architecture (gothic limestone, lots of trees), and Lake Michigan (blue green). They then showed how this plays out across many many different sites which have unique designs but are cohesive.