Tag Archives: Q&A

Investments and Treasury

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Stakeholder: Derek Hammel

Web Makeover Contact:  Jai Shankar

  • Ability to publish/post documents to the site
  • Search box/A-Z menu
  • Ability to post PowerPoint presentations or “Endowment 101” education materials
  • Streaming data across top or bottom of page, example: financial news or ticker symbols
  • Ability to access policies currently in place
  • Link from this site to articles/sites of interest
  • Interactive map of the world to see where Middlebury’s investment managers are located or operate
  • A video showing the background of the endowment and the important role it plays for the College’s operations
  • Ability for public to submit endowment-related questions via the website
  • Ability to educate prospective donors/public about the “lifecycle of an endowment gift” that shows people what actually happens to their endowment donations when they are added to the overall College “Endowment Fund”
  • Secure log-in feature for trustees or investment committee members to access meeting materials
  • Ability to view debt market, equity market, municipal finance market data

The Commons and Orientation

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Stakeholder: Katy Abbott
Website: http://www.middlebury.edu/campuslife/commons and http://www.middlebury.edu/campuslife/events/orientation
Redo Contact: Ryan Kellett

General: Orientation in both February and September is run, in part, by CCAL (JJ Boggs). There are five commons, each with unique personality and work processes. This report represents all five commons.

Orientation Requirements:

  • Constant Update: the orientation website is unique in that information changes almost daily, especially in the several weeks prior to Orientation which takes place in September and February. That said, the authors of these updates are far and wide since Orientation brings in many areas of the College. It is essential to both have a “working space” for information updates and then a one-click solution to immediately reflect those changes on outward-facing website which is presented to all incoming first-years. Currently, it is far too cumbersome to update the site that often and results in misinformation among first-years who then choose to call in or email.
  • Workflow: The collection of people in charge of Orientation do not have the time or background to necessarily update the website. They have other roles at the College and therefore updating falls to the wayside.
  • AskHiba: It would be nice to have an AskHiba-type (http://askhiba.wordpress.com/) place for first-years to ask questions and receive answers from peers (both upperclassmen and other first-years). This would relieve some of the pressure of calls and emails while still being quite personal. Students should be able (and are likely willing) to run this site. If it’s possible, it would be nice to dynamically feed a FAQ from these questions and answers.
  • Facebook: Start “official” Facebook groups for the admitted students (which then turn into first-years). It should be official in that the school or a Middlebury student moderates it, but it should not be moderated by the Orientation committee. Link our pages into this group.
  • Text Online: find a better way to display lots of info in CMS rather than lists and PDFs.
  • Visually Stimulating: better visual appeal and presentation of orientation information. Rollover graphics would be nice.
  • Similar CCAL (Doug Adams) functionality: online forms, payment, ticketing, embedded interactive media, etc. We do need to be able to take reservations and payment on line.  Class photos, Bread Loaf accommodations, and more mean that having that capacity would be ideal.

Commons Requirements:

  • FYS and Sophomore Experience: Find ways to support the first-year seminars and sophomore experience as part of the 4/2 Commons System. This could take the form of displaying some of the work from the FYS, as fed up through class blogs or websites. This should not require students to do any more work than they already do — should be automated in feeding up content to populate some sort of display of the Commons experience
  • Dynamic Bulletin Boards: Commons are often places to post information (for example in weekly “newsletter” type publications that are posted in bathrooms). An online space (message board, wiki, or wall?) for such activity might be nice but must be sure not to compete with other online spaces. If underused, it becomes useless. Some sort of moderation/vetting needs to be in place.
  • Neighborhood: there should be a way of identifying students online (within the Middlebury universe) as from a certain commons.
  • Deans and Faculty Heads: There should be a better way to connect with deans and faculty heads which are the “family” within the Commons. A lot of emails go out from Commons Coordinators that say: “faculty heads have tickets available for these performances” or “the dean reminds you to bundle up because of extra cold weather this week!” These types of announcements are common but finding a way for deans/faculty heads to connect (but also get information from) is important.

Sponsored Research Office

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Jim Ralph, Dean of Faculty Development and Research

Franci Farnsworth, Coordinator of Sponsored Research

Alison Darrow, Science Grants and Writing Facilitator

Our website serves several constituents:

  • the Controller’s office: we host their grant-related policies and information
  • faculty seeking grants: we supply tips, data, institutional policies & guidelines, forms, etc. to help guide proposal writing and application
  • Advancement’s office of Corporate and Foundation Relations: we share some policies and procedures, which are hosted at our site
  • the Dean of Faculty Development and Research: our site announces faculty grants and annual reports of grants awarded, a key way to celebrate faculty successes

We are a two-person office that reports to the DFDR; both of us maintain and update the site. Out offices are spread throughout campus (the Library, Bi Hall, Old Chapel), so sharing information electronically is crucial. The current site is an artifact of dumping old paper-based documents online in order to have at least some web resource and then not having the time to update or redesign. As a result, the site doesn’t invite active engagement and participation and is static and text-heavy. Faculty currently underuse our site, probably because it’s easier to just call us than it is to find and use information at our site. Revision and redesign is now ongoing, but a lot of what we do is still email-driven.

What we hope for from a new site:

  • an easier and more intuitive way to add linked pages, to help break up long blocks of text a way to add pop-ups, drop-down menus, etc., to keep users from having to navigate to other pages for short bits of supporting or related information
  • an easier way to “hide” and control access to sensitive and confidential content
  • ability to assign levels of access for stuff the office shares: currently we use Google docs for our department “whiteboard”
  • access for many users (including faculty and student workers) to edit the site and notify us easily so we can approve content before publishing it
  • dynamic linking to other departments’ information, through Banner and other means, so that redundant updates aren’t necessary
  • a platform-neutral system
  • ability to edit the site remotely

Features that would improve efficiency and help our workflow:

  • customized user profiles
  • a shared calendar
  • an anual grants-deadline calendar with a way to let faculty subscribe to alerts and reminders (currently we have to spam them)
  • a way to let faculty notify us that they plan to apply for specific grants
  • ability to dynamically link to and from faculty CVs and other content required for proposal writing (Institutional Research data especially; links with the library’s thesis archive; central database for faculty publications/achievements; faculty pages; career-path info for science alums, etc.)

Types of interactivity that would help our office communicate more effectively:

  • drop-down menus and pop-up windows so we don’t need to link to new pages – would flatten and simplify navigation considerably
  • an index of terms & acronyms (offices, agencies, etc)
  • dynamic timelines, checklists, and other forms that could be filled out online
  • calculators, worksheets, spreadsheets with College and funding rates and percentages built in
  • dynamic comments (e.g., user-contribute FAQ)
  • feeds of sponsored & relevant events, such as guideline updates, workshops
    & seminars
  • integrated links to Banner information
  • dynamic link updating, so that if material shared with another department is moved, the link on our page still works (or we’re notified to fix it)

Examples of functionality, design, and features from other colleges or industries that we like and admire:

  • Google docs: clean, simple, fast, super-easy to use and share
  • Google calendar: ditto
  • Boston University: clean, uncluttered design, yet there’s a lot going on; really like the tabbed navigation on the Home page and the way each tab slides aside to launch a video, interactive map, etc. (and that user has the option to interact or not).
  • The Daily Beast: the Cheat Sheet is a great feature

Current functionality of the Middlebury site and CMS:

    Editing is OK but clunky and subject to unexpected results; especially formatting carrying over when you cut & paste. It would be helpful to be able to see formatting tags (toggle on and off) so we could find and fix weirdness. Currently sometimes have to delete and redo because we can’t figure out how to fix the formatting.
    When Save refreshes the screen, it puts you at the top of the page: very annoying to have to scroll back down! Would be easier if it refreshed to where you left off.
    Hyperlink Mgr is great, very easy to use. Same with uploading documents.
    Really hate the way the right sidebar either doesn’t reflect the page titles or creates redundancy – not certain what creates this problem – editing page titles after they’re created? If so, the sidebar should reflect any changes to the page titles dynamically. Right now, we’re not even sure the sidebar can be changed, once created.
    More flexibility with fonts and text size would be nice.

ES/EA/Sustainability Integration (SI)

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Stakeholder: Jack Byrne

Redo Contact: MS Costanza-Robinson

Currently, ES/EA/SI has a relatively low-tech site that includes text and photos on their page and has a variety of file types for download (powerpoint files of presentations, pdfs of reports and newsletters). This functionality needs to remain, but be expanded and improved upon. The current status of the site is due largely to limited personnel time dedicated to the website. A recent (1-year only) hire will have some role in introducing content and improvements. Requests and or plans for future functionality/technology include:

  • Embedded video and/or audio (e.g., of the weekly ES Colloquium or other seminars)
  • Better access (possible including standard reports) to better web-use statistics
  • Ability to easily form Listservs or groups that specifically include non-Midd addresses (not just built within Outlook) and the ability to generate an email newsletter to the listserv participants; people should be able to subscribe and unsubscribe.
  • Training / portal functions
  • Tagging/aggregating/approving sustainability information from across the website (athletics, EA, SI, IS) and feed it to the ES/EA/SI site
  • Add ability to accept online submission of grant proposals (see URO stakeholder report for more on this requirement)
  • Add searchable archive of ES/EA/SI funding (proposals/reports from previous grant awards) or perhaps of Environmental Council minutes of meetings (see Faculty Council requirement document)
  • Integration of databases across campus and web-output of data: for example Facilities has a lot of information (facility energy consumption, building occupants) that Jack needs. The current process includes too many file-type conversions and people involved in getting the right information. The data exist, but the searches/databases (Sightlines?) are not web-based. Obviously, permissions issues would be important here.
  • The possibility for people to web-submit photos/ideas/text for the website for possible inclusion on the page.

Specific problems with the current site/CMS that were mentioned

  • Tiny blue font
  • CMS awkwardness – simplify direct editing of pages (uploading too many clicks, particularly when you upload the wrong file by accident, to remove that and upload the correct one takes far too many clicks; what you see (even in preview mode) isn’t always what you get)
  • CMS editor permissions issues: student workers have historically done some of the content management for ES/EA/SI. Jack Byrne, as the person in charge of these areas, would like privileges to set-up/approve student permissions. Currently, the administrative hurdles here are time-consuming.
  • Channel pages creating/editing: is it possible to reduce administrative bottlenecks
  • Improve ability to edit CMS on Macs

Specific non-technological requests/thoughts for new site

  • Increase EA/SI prominence on webpage (homepage?)
  • Branding is important, but the flexibility of many templates would be helpful
  • More training – existing training is good, but more could be useful on more topics