In early October, several from university relations attended the HighEdWeb 2012 Conference in Milwaukee, Wisc. As always, the conference offered a lot of valuable material and provided excellent opportunities to network and share with other Web professionals from across the U.S. (and world).
What we learned
Below are some “golden nuggets” that our staff gathered at conference sessions:
No Such Thing As TMI: How to Create a Culture of Sharing
Recommendation from Brian Heaton
Adding language in student acceptance packets encouraging students to tweet about their acceptance using a specified hashtag. This continued the bonding process between the student and school and generated identifiable traffic that helped connect the student to other accepted students.
Card Sorting: Research That Every Web Developer Should Use
Recommendation from Jessica Clements
Doug Tschopp’s session was a great reminder that our words may not be their words. Refraining from the use of jargon is a common writing tip, and Doug’s presentation provided a basic research method to identify “hidden” jargon. Through card sorting, a member of your target audience organizes a set of cards according to what they think goes together, removing the cards that don’t belong and adding any needed cards to complete a set. For a Web developer, this process identifies what topics users naturally group together, what terms are best for a site’s navigation and what words translate as jargon.
Rethinking the Virtual Tour: An Immersive Experience that’s more than a Map
Recommendation from Grayson Gordon
The session revealed the statistics on how many virtual tour visits converted to on-campus visits which in turn converted to enrollment. See the related website.
Mobile Warming: A New Approach to Student Engagement
Recommendation from Josh Durham
Professors can use phones and tablets to help students get the most out of class time with the use of chat room style apps. As a professor is lecturing, students can anonymously and silently post questions and other students can answer them in real time. The professor can look at what questions are being posted and decide if students are grasping the concept being taught in class in real time as well. Another benefit of this technology is that it allows students who would otherwise sit silently in class a chance to ask questions and statistics have shown that student success went up with the use of the app.