Tag Archives: ada

Schools Abroad

Leave a reply

Form of contact: Meeting with Coordinators and Senior Staff

Stakeholder: Liz Ross and Jeff Cason

WebRedo Contact: Jamie Northrup

Website: http://www.middlebury.edu/academics/sa

Brief:

Requirements:

  • Easier navigation- drop downs
  • some interactive features like discussion/blog/wiki
  • a ‘discussion’ where students can post, but the postings are only viewed by administrator.
  • We currently have on-line application for non-Midd students applying to Schools Abroad.  It will be very help for advisors/faculty to be able to submit references electronically as well; currently they can just download a PDF and then send it to us.
  • Possibly create a system so that study abroad advisors at other institutions can track students’ applications to see what stage in the process they are in.
  • Being able to send emails to batches of students (Midd/NonMidd/Term Abroad would be handy, though we can access this info now with FMP, or Excel sheets for those of us who keep Banner records in Excel
  • Ability to upload and maintain forms on the www site
  • Option for text-only loading; useful for students abroad in minimal connection environments (e.g. Russia)
  • Directory – improvement would be to search the directory/website directly from the homepage rather than having to click on the link to the directory page.   Also it’s good that there is a drop-down menu for departments, but “student” would be a choice.  And now that it’s been upgraded, the results are shown below (on my screen/browser) the search screen, so you have to scroll to see the results, when really, once I’ve search, that part of the screen could go away.
  • Segue: the text formatting is terrible (it reformats however it likes and doesn’t allow you to change the formatting once on the interface).  This means that unless you’re typing everything from scratch on Segue, the formatting is screwy.  Also, the “son of segue” version, which lacks the quiz function, makes it less useful.
  • Event registration: I like the automatic reply that tells you your event has been submitted successfully, and I like the on-line calendar/room availability feature-it saves a lot of back and forth. On-line forms, such as Events Scheduling, is useful and works well.
  • Student Worker job posting: VERY easy to use-I wouldn’t change a thing, but there has got to be a way to electronically submit a student payroll authorization form.
  • KeySurvey-This seems to be working well, now that we have a departmental account and can steal from one another’s surveys.  The inability to run a report by respondent and hide the email (making them cease to be anonymous) can be problematic.
  • CMS.  I especially like the ability to “replace” old documents.  It’s recently been proven problematic when we link to a server (on-line application, for example) without the “go” url-and then the server we’ve linked to is off-line.  It’s difficult to know what he “go” addresses are and when to use them if we haven’t created them.  The other problems I have are the bulleted lists (if you remove a bulleted list, I can never get that final bullet to delete) and the multiple pastings of text (instead of inserting a new paragraph, often it will insert it twice-and you can’t always just go in and delete the second one).  Much better in this version than the past is the ability to change the size of an existing table and align pictures/wrap text. It would be nice if the Resource Manager saved resources in either alphabetical or chronological order…some type of searchable order (any order really) would be nice rather than the apparent randomization it uses now.
  • Being able to submit grades online (Blackboard has this functionality)

Office of Institutional Planning and Diversity (OIPD)

Leave a reply

Stakeholder: Jennifer Herrera
Website: http://www.middlebury.edu/campuslife/diversity
WebRedo Contact: Ryan Kellett / Pooja Shahani

General: OIPD has a variety of separate constituencies embedded within this larger area. International Student & Scholar Services has their own Stakeholder report. ADA (http://www.middlebury.edu/campuslife/diversity/ada/) and Institutional Research (http://www.middlebury.edu/administration/instres/) are included in this report.

Requirements:

  • Maintain support for the recently completed IPD flash site (highly branded, front-end site) (http://sandcat.middlebury.edu/comm/OIPD/)
  • Events Scheduling: IPD requests a better way to push events information for Cafecito hours and other diversity-related events to internal audiences, in particular students. This can be accomplished through a news feed (RSS). When an event changes, IPD requests an automatic event notification that alerts people to the change. IPD is willing to reduce email blasts if events feed is effective.
  • Forms: a dynamic customizable form that can be used by students to apply for co-sponsorship funding. There needs to be a better way and interface for accessing the data collected from these forms because it’s hard to understand the datafields that come back through email currently. Form should be more easily accessible by students.
  • CMS: Easier, better, and more-flexible CMS. Spellcheck within CMS?
  • Website font too small. Easier way to increase font size.
  • Sharing: IPD requests ability to share relavent articles from around the web with visitors of the site.
  • ADA Office:
    • The webpage must be meaningfully accessible e.g. work with screen readers and have tags that truly describe photos and the like.
    • Some people have had trouble “noticing” the page links to the left of my current site… they actually think that the only information for the ADA Office is on the first page that comes up. Can we make the links more obvious? Perhaps list the links on the actual page instead of to the right or left of it?
    • The ADA Policy is fairly long so it is helpful to be able to click on a section link and be directed to that section… that is currently the set-up and I’d like to make sure it stays that way.
  • Institutional Research: As you might expect, we do a lot of reporting on our website-it is a place where external folks, such as colleagues at our peer schools, find details they need about Middlebury and where our staff and faculty can find info they may need in their work. At a basic level, we need the site to have a place for all the items there currently, such as Factbooks, CDSs, National Surveys, etc. We need a place for posting just things for internal viewing (also similar to what we have now). My hope is that the IR site would continue to be an easily accessible, clear place to find data and reports that external and internal “customers” need.

    In terms of wishes, one enhancement to the internal part of the site may be dedicated to Self-Study/Re-accreditation work (depending on how it is decided to set things up for this campus-wide work). Other enhancements may be to post or link to some of the items Jenn Nuceder works on, for example with regard to MIIS reports.