Liaison: Maggie Paine

Stakeholders interviewed: Liz Robinson and Kelsey Eichhorn

Overview

The Project on Creativity on Creativity and Innovation has xx key needs-to showcase, share, and celebrate student work; to fund raise for student projects using a microphilanthropy site; to automate some processes (for example, applying for project approval); to archive projects so that they are accessible; to sell student artwork online; to connect students with alumni; and to share current research, stories, and lectures on creativity and innovation.

Showcasing and Sharing Student Work

The project needs to tell the story of student creativity and innovation at Middlebury, celebrating successes and inspiring others to follow their passions and take creative risks. To that end, the site needs to:

• Enable students to post their art and other content online. See http://kalman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/29/the-inauguration-at-last/ for an example of how art might be displayed. Have option to post to MiddTube simultaneously.
• Enable students, faculty, staff, alumni, and others to comment.
• Embed video, audio slideshows, etc.
• Offer blogs for individual projects and a template for displaying work
• Create a seamless connection/integration between the student projects online and the Project on Creativity web site
• Interactive feature that would enable viewer to see a snapshot of multiple projects and the people who are working on them and then click on one for more information. For example a photo gallery, that when you rolled over a particular photo of a person and you’d get a brief quote. Click on the full story and it delivers the story in a pop-up screen. See www.msnbc.com/id/26903309
• Enable students to pull their project web sites into Facebook and display them there.
• Provide an interactive map that would make it easy to find Old Stone Mill and see what is happening there.

Fund Raising for Student Projects

The Project envisions a microphilanthropy site that combines concepts from microfinance and social networking and that enables donors to fund specific student projects that are meaningful to them and to connect with students and with others who share their interests. This would be similar to kiva.org and donorschoose.org.

Automation of Processes

• The project would like to create an online form that students applying for grants or for space in Old Stone Mill could fill out online, including photos, project summary, and lengthier description. Content (photo, summary) could then be automatically pulled into the Project on Creativity Web site (after review by project director).
• Form that students participating in the Hunt could use to answer questions online and submit the form to the project director for review.

Project Archiving

• The project needs a way to archive projects, so that they are still accessible after completion, but not competing with current projects for space on top level pages.

Sales of artwork

• Students would like to be able to sell their artwork online using an e-commerce tool (perhaps using program developed for college store?)

Connection to Alumni

• Links to the project site in PantherNet
• Opportunity to comment on student projects (via blogs)
• Microphilanthropy site

Sharing Current Research

• The project would like to create an online library of current research on the topics of innovation and creativity, including video and audio, text postings, pdfs, links, and to use other methods LIS might suggest.

Liaisons: Joe Antonioli and Maggie Paine

Stakeholders interviewed: Susie Patterson Nichols ’78, president MCAA, and Zach Bourque ’01, vice president

Susie and Zach had one main concern and they reiterated a requirement stated by the Alumni and Parent Programs Office. They want to ensure that we can collect data on alumni, particularly their e-mail and home or work mailing address. And, like the folks in the APP office, they want the different alumni sites-Harris Connect, Middlebury Online, the APP site, College Advancement site, CSO career advising, Initiative site, and microphilanthropy site-to be seamlessly integrated and easy to find.

MCAA communication efforts are hampered by a lack of e-mail addresses and home addresses. They want any registration form to include these required fields and are open to any other methods of collecting this data that we might suggest.

They would like to see a more obvious link to the alumni site from the home page.

They were very interested in the personalized home page idea and wondered if we could feed information to alumni based on their records in Banner. For example, if an alumnus had played varsity lacrosse, we would send him updates on the team-game scores, notices of webcasts, stories about players, etc.

They also liked the idea of logging onto one site, such as Facebook or Midd personalized home page, and being linked to all the sites the person subscribes to: Panthernet, LinkedIn, My Space, Middlebury personalized home page.

Stakeholder Liaisons: Maggie Paine, Joe Antonioli

Stakeholders interviewed: Barbara Marlow, Scott Atherton, Bert Phinney, John Nordmeyer, Bob Clagett; discussions with entire admissions staff; focus group with prospective students from Addison County and focus groups with Noble and Greenough juniors and seniors; interview with Nobles head guidance counselor.

Easy Access to Information

Overall site and admissions site should make access to information easy

• On the home page, highlight the undergraduate college and make it easy to get to admissions information. Currently it’s clear how to get information on LS, BLSE, BLWC, and Schools Abroad, but not clear that Middlebury is an undergraduate college or how to get admissions information.
• Improve navigation (drop-down menu?)
• Improve search
  • Consider artificial intelligence: ability for prospective students to type in a search term or questions and for the server to recognize what information they want and to deliver it.
    • “Ask Middlebury” feature, similar to Ask Jeeves. Ex: What if I don’t have a graded essay?
  • Provide search tool that allows you to type words directly into it
• Improve organization of admissions site. Should act as gateway/jumping off point for prospective students and parents. Links to key information should be available and clear. Need to analyze what should be on home page and what one click away.
  • Recurring questions/concerns
    • Can’t find international student information and application requirements
    • Financial aid is hard to find and comprehensive fee is buried.
    • Don’t know where to start
    • Too many clicks to find information
    • Hard to find majors and programs, pre-professional programs
    • What are the requirements for admission?
    • What are the admissions deadlines?
    • Online course catalog is hard to find and then it’s hard to navigate through the courses and other information.
    • Orientation information hard to find
    • Preprofessional program information hard to find and not comprehensive enough
    • Meet the staff is hard to find.
    • CCAL is not an intuitive name for student organizations and its site is hard to find.
    • Admissions officer school visit schedule is hard to find.
    • Academic calendar is buried-too hard to find
    • Lack of information on outcomes-grad school acceptances, graduate careers, etc.
  • Academic department sites vary greatly in their ability to convey what it would be like to major in this field at Middlebury, why you would want to study that subject here, and what graduates are doing. Need to provide student perspectives; info on research opportunities, equipment (where applicable), what graduates are doing, testimonials that demonstrate success. Perhaps this can be addressed by repurposing content developed for other uses (development, admissions, MiddTube, etc.) and pulling appropriate content onto department pages and into prospective students’ personalized pages.

Overall site and admissions site should differentiate Middlebury from its peers and bring the College to life

• Site should be “cool,” up to date, convey sense that Middlebury is current.
  • Site should be engaging and interactive with stories, photos, videos, slideshows, blogs, fun features.
    • “Eye candy:” animation, photos, graphics were cited in prospective student focus group as key.
    • Must reflect the beauty of the campus, sense of place, the intellectual excitement of classes and research, and convey what it would be like to be a student and that this is a welcoming and diverse campus community, etc. Student life is key (dorms, dining halls, people, activities, town of Middlebury, not isolated)
    • Content should convey advantages of top liberal arts schools and differentiate Middlebury from peer schools
• Ability to engage students with fresh content on a regular basis.
  • Create admissions specific content on regular basis, but also repurpose and pull in content created for other uses
  • Make it easy to keep content up to date by automatically pulling information from Banner, other areas of the web site, and databases wherever possible
  • Blogs written by current students and other student-generated content
  • Ask a Midd Kid type feature, where students answer questions that come in
  • Online chat with students and admissions officers
  • Videos
    • Available on all platforms
    • Ability to deliver embedded video on Midd site
  • Virtual tour
• Quick facts, similar to viewbook overview
• Larger font size for text on the site
• Provide overall advice on the college search/application process from either dean or other admissions office member; keep adding info throughout year and try to make personal connection to the dean.
• Life after Middlebury section with more on pre-professional preparation, internships, jobs, grad schools, graduate careers
• Online presentation about Middlebury, similar to the group information session, with photos and/or video to illustrate the points made. Post on web site, YouTube, and MiddTube, and make available as podcast.

Personal Home Pages

Admissions sees a need for personalized/customized home pages for prospective students, for guidance counselors, and for themselves.

• Personal pages for prospective students should:
  • make a personal connection to individuals by regularly delivering content of interest to them;
  • Pull content from elsewhere on the site;
  • deliver information on deadlines and requirements;
  • allow students to check the status of their applications, update their interests, see events in their area, find out when an admissions officer or alumni rep will be visiting their area, and connect with professors and staff they met on campus;
  • enable information displayed to change automatically, as a student moves from inquirant to applicant to matriculant;
  • enable admissions counselors to communicate with students they interviewed after students are accepted using the personal home page;
  • enable students to use their Facebook log-in to access their personalized Middlebury site and to access it from their Facebook page
• Personal page for Midd admissions officers should:
  • provide automatically updated information on statistics (how many apps today, etc.);
  • travel itineraries
  • list of students/schools and where they are in the application process (including list of applicants who get in).
• Personal pages for guidance counselors should
  • deliver information about their particular schools and students. (historical data on students from their schools who have applied to Middlebury, list of students who have applied and where they are in the process until they are admitted or denied).

Technical requirements

• Make going back and forth from Middlebury to Facebook, YouTube, and other social networking sites easy. Take advantage of existing technology.
• Content and web pages that load quickly and are deliverable to web-capable cell phones, such as iPhone and Blackberry.
• Data automatically entered into Banner from prospective students’ first online contact through enrollment.
• Ability for students to upload supplementary materials (supplementary essay; graded essay; and also video, music, art) rather than sending them separately or sending a DVD.
• Ability to post admissions officers’ travel itineraries automatically, as dates for school visits are added or changed.
• Random questions come into admissions and are dispersed to different counselors. Is it possible to have automatic response to the frequently asked questions?
• Retain online sign-up for preview days
• Ability to track where prospective students go after they visit the site.
• Incorporate the existing online alumni admissions program, which allows people to sign up to become alumni admissions representatives, get assignments, and make comments.
• Create a database of counselors, heads of schools.

Stakeholder: Jai Shankar

Web Makeover Contact:  Jai Shankar

• Create a policy library that can be categorized and searched easily
• Password protected log in sections where certain data can be shared
• Streaming data or news specific for the CFO’s area
• Podcast
• Audio/video functionality
• Training functionality for finance related areas (e.g. budget process, how to fill out a check request etc.)
• Blogs
• Ability to set up a test (e.g. in lieu of attending a mandatory training session required to get a Purchasing Card, the person takes on online test to get he Purchasing Card)
• Single sign on
• Ability to pick and choose documents on the site and it automatically e-mailed to the web user.
• A CFO default site that is customized and pushed at the department level.