Archive for September, 2009
open access to scholarly work will change how academics use online tools
Posted by Anya in othersidenotes on September 15th, 2009
Inside Higher Ed reported today that five major universities have signed a Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity, an agreement that pledges to support journals that provide free and open access to content, upholding the rigors of peer review and research while providing greater access to publications that previously have been quite costly and published only in print or closed online subscriptions.
I’m particularly interested in this development as it relates to the individual’s increased ability to share their work with audiences larger than those a subscription publication may be able to provide. I’ve been working with a client on a new Portfolio tool for academics, and in a lot of our market research, academics cited publications’ unwillingness to share content as a major barrier to them being able to showcase their work to larger audiences.
With online portfolios, websites and blog becoming a major venue for those in higher ed to publish their work to the wider world, this move by universities to support opening the walled garden of research to the general public will be a major boon to academics looking to increase their visibility in their field.
It will definitely be interesting to see how this open access plays out, but if you want to learn more about the compact, you can read Inside Higher Ed’s take here. You can also weigh in on academic portfolios and how those in higher ed showcase their work by taking a quick survey here!
10 harsh truths about institutional websites
Posted by Anya in othersidenotes on September 8th, 2009
Paul Boag talks about the top ten challenges he sees in getting a working and worthwhile college/university website and web presence. This is a great presentation and is DEFINITELY worth listening to all the way through, but I’ve pulled out a few great points here below to consider:
1. Make better use of CMS and content providers: be sure that writing, updating and removing out of date web copy is included in people’s job descriptions. Having a dedicated web team doesn’t negate the need for getting information from the experts themselves.
2. Social media is hard. Take a moment to think about what is it you are trying to do with social media? Facebook and Twitter are merely tools for engagement; engagement should be the main goal, not use of the tool for the sake of using the tool. For example, using Twitter as simply a broadcast tool defeats the actual purpose of that platform. Invest in social media strategy for the long term. Has to do more with customer service than marketing.
3. Think about becoming more user-focused. Create user-personas, understand what terminology and content makes sense for each persona, what are their goals and structure your site around those use cases. And make sure content providers understand the user personas so they are writing for that audience! User-test your site on a regular basis.
4. Stop trying to appeal to everyone. Instead, design your website to offend nobody, but appeal to somebody. Know what your institution is about, and cater to that audience.
5. Your site is bloated and out of date. Whose job is it to deal with that out of date content? And there is too much content! Users get lost in it all. Massively simplify your college’s website.
6. Undergraduates especially are very savvy about being marketed to. They want transparency, relationship building, honesty and openness. This is what builds engagement online.
7. Because you have so many content providers, content becomes repetitive, inconsistent, and not aligned with overall strategy. To avoid this, put together content templates for content providers. Helps them to focus on user needs, learning purpose, what can the user do in this section of the website, and what action do they want visitors to take.
8. Why do you have a website? How do you measure success? Set business objectives and measurable success criteria. Be proactive. Consider your overall strategy.
9. You sell courses. And your course finders stink. Invest in your course finder. Help people make the right course decisions, pick the right classes. It can be very overwhelming. Make it simple, provide guidance.
10. Politics are killing your site. You need someone senior with authority over the whole site who can get over power struggles. You need the power to say NO.
Ten harsh truths about institutional websites from Paul Boag on Vimeo.
