HighEdWebDev 2006 :: Collective Intelligence

Program Sessions and Tracks

Strategy, Design & Marketing

SMD1: The Recruiting 2.0 Revolution

Brian Wm. Niles, TargetX

There's been a fundamental change in the way students learn about colleges, and it requires a revolutionary change in the way colleges communicate with prospects. We have entered the era of "Recruiting 2.0," where you have to engage prospective students. Talk with them, not at them. Forego marketing speak for credible content. And you need to do all this through the technologies that today's teens know and love best -- blogs, podcasts, personalized e-mail, text messaging. Those colleges that remain stuck in the 1.0 era -- relying heavily on direct-mail campaigns, publications, and other one-way communication methods -- will find themselves falling behind their competitors.

This session will review the tools and methods available to help schools take advantage of a new environment where prospective students are in control.

This session is scheduled for Mon, Oct 23, from 9:45 AM to 10:45 AM.

SMD2: Journey from Admissions to Enrollment

Sara Worrell-Berg, The University of Chicago

Dena van der Wal, The University of Chicago

Mitchell Kim, The University of Chicago

The University of Chicago Networking Services & Information Technologies Web Services department partners with the Office of College Admissions and the College Programming Office to provide a continuous online experience from application to matriculation. The Uncommon Application, ThickEnvelope, and "Class of" sites guide students through the stages of admission, reduce the time and resources necessary to process applications, and build a community between students, families, and staff.

Uncommon Application fielded more than 10,000 applications for the 2006-2007 academic year and is credited with helping to increase the overall number of applications received. With ThickEnvelope, students can reply to admission offers online. Students can research housing options, register to visit campus, submit class enrollment and housing application forms, and pay deposits online. In its first year of existence, more than 50 percent of students replied to their offer of admission on the ThickEnvelope site versus traditional paper forms. "Class of" sites are dynamic Web sites created for each undergraduate class. They serve as an online community for all four years of the student's academic career. Popular features include "to do" lists, bulletin boards, polls, and photo albums. College staff can update announcements and send bulk e-mails using a Web-based administrative tool.

This session is scheduled for Mon, Oct 23, from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM.

SMD3: A Panel Discussion on Portals

Mark Albert, Gettysburg College

Michelle Tarby, Le Moyne College

Jeremy Trumble, Rochester Institute of Technology

Learn from the experiences of others and share your own stories of portal implementation.

This session is scheduled for Mon, Oct 23, from 1:30 PM to 2:30 PM.

SMD4: Creating a Personalized Community for Accepted Students to Drive Engagement and Enrollment: One School's Story

Doug Ruschman, Xavier University

Find out how Xavier University transformed their Accepted Student Web site from stagnant to interactive in just ten weeks. With their nose to the grind stone, a focused approach, a small team of people, and a little outside help, they produced an award-winning Web site that will be quick to impress. Recently featured in the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Road to Xavier (roadto.xavier.edu) allows accepted students to interact with each other, coordinate their financial aid, watch cartoons, and more. Better yet, the site helped the Office of Admission achieve its goal: better yield of their accepted students. Learn more about why a dynamic Web site was so important to them, the steps they took to make this happen, and the return on investment from the site.

This session is scheduled for Mon, Oct 23, from 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM.

SMD5: Card Sorting: Research That Every Web Developer Should Use

Douglas Tschopp, Augustana College

Card sorting is a low-cost, fairly simple, quick, and effective method that informs the process of developing site architecture. This simple research method is one that every Web developer should use. The focus of this session is to explain how card sort research is done and to share some results of a sort done at Augustana College in Illinois.

This session is scheduled for Mon, Oct 23, from 4:15 PM to 4:45 PM.

SMD6: New Site Starter Kit

Jack Auses, The University of Chicago

Mitchell Kim, The University of Chicago

The University of Chicago Web Services department created a "Starter Kit" that serves as a foundation for building new Web sites. The Starter Kit consists of a series of valid and standard XHTML/CSS templates covering a variety of common design layouts, accessibility features, and JavaScript examples.

In an environment without a unified Web template, typical at many colleges and universities, the process of building a new site often entails re-inventing the wheel to solve common CSS design problems, such as basic layout and navigation.

The Starter Kit arose out of the need to provide a common platform for new site development. Some of the benefits of providing designers with this common platform are:

This session is scheduled for Mon, Oct 23, from 5:00 PM to 5:30 PM.

SMD7: SEO—Search Engine Optimization: Tips & Tricks

Martha Carrer Cruz Gabriel, Universidade de Sao Paulo Universidade Anhembi Morumbi

Optimizing your Web site to be positioned among the top ten in search engine results is one of the best and cheapest ways of getting the right people to visit. On the other hand, it requires some techniques and care in order to get there. This presentation will discuss how to optimize Web page code to become "search engine friendly" and to get the desired results in terms of positioning. Guidelines, tools, and real cases examples of SEO success will be presented.

This session is scheduled for Tue, Oct 24, from 8:15 AM to 9:15 AM.

SMD8: Incremental Redesign: A More Manageable Approach to Improving your Web Site

Rose Pruyne, The Pennsylvania State University

Using the principles of Extreme Programming, Incremental Redesign is a much more manageable approach to implementing changes to a Web site and is a far saner alternative to the "Big Rollout." This presentation focuses on maximizing Web usability and making the user a key participant in Web redesign.

This session is scheduled for Tue, Oct 24, from 9:45 AM to 10:45 AM.

SMD9: It's the End of the Web as We Know It (and I Feel Fine!)

Mark Greenfield, University at Buffalo

It's a new dawn. The next generation of the Web is approaching. A Web that is accessed more and more by mobile devices - anytime, anywhere. Where it is just as easy to create content as it is to consume it. A Web connected through syndication rather than links, and where more and more, the user is in control. This presentation will focus on the future direction of the Web and the implications for higher education Web professionals. Topics will include the mobile Web, converging technologies, the read/write Web, rich media, Web 2.0, and everywhere. The goal is to have the audience take a step back and think long term about the social and cultural changes, and the new opportunities for communicating and providing services to our constituents.

This session is scheduled for Tue, Oct 24, from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM.

SMD10: Cooking up a Micro-Site: A Recipe for Web Integration

Lee Staton, Indiana University Southeast

Jenny Johnson Wolf, Indiana University Southeast

This summer, our campus launched an integrated marketing campaign that featured billboards, print ads, radio and in-theater ads, and direct mail. A key campaign element was a Web site for prospects: a "micro-site." Prospects are often confused by the sheer volume of choices on a university's main Web site. Tailoring a micro-site for their specific needs is an important step in drawing them in and appealing to their aesthetics. Our micro-site includes video and audio podcasts, streaming video, blogs, a virtual tour, and much more — designed and built within a shockingly short time frame. We'll reveal how we aimed the design at our target youth audience, recruiting student talent for the photography, video, radio spots, and blogs. With a primary assignment of generating contacts for the admissions office, tracking each element of the campaign was critical. We'll talk turkey about what worked and didn't. We will reveal how — at the same time we built the micro-site — we were also selling the idea throughout the campus to gain support for the site and the campaign. If your school is considering a micro-site, or should be, this case study will let you know what's ahead.

This session is scheduled for Tue, Oct 24, from 1:30 PM to 2:30 PM.

SMD11: Trials and Tribulations of a Portal: my.geneseo.edu

Kirk Anne, SUNY Geneseo

In this showcase, we will go through the process of how SUNY Geneseo's portal came to be and some of the things we have learned from developing it. Some topics that will be covered:

This session is scheduled for Tue, Oct 24, from 2:45 PM to 3:15 PM.

SMD12: Creating a PHP Portal for Perseus Survey Solutions

Jonathan Peck, SUNY Oswego

As part of a contract, the Center for Business and Community Development at SUNY Oswego was instructed to design, implement, and distribute a series of surveys and case studies. Our university had licensed Perseus Survey Solutions for enterprise survey processing. However, the software could not assign and audit progress of a group of users across multiple surveys, nor was there a user portal to track individual progress across multiple surveys. Using PHP and MySQL, we created a custom portal to interact with PSS for administration and users. This session will present the details of the project, including: *Project requirements * Overview of Perseus Survey Solutions * Analysis, design, and implementation * Use of WAMP on laptops for offline surveys * Demonstration of the interface.

This session is scheduled for Tue, Oct 24, from 3:30 PM to 4:00 PM.

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