Text Messaged Acceptance
February 8, 2006 | 1 Comment
Creighton University has started sending early acceptance to students who opted in for SMS notification. In laymans terms, they text message their cell phones.
Since November, 700 students - or 44 percent - of those admitted to Creighton have been notified through a text message. The school added the option on application forms last fall. [...]
Opting for the text message allows students to know the university’s decision up to a week earlier. [...] text messages are sent to students within 24 hours of the admission committee’s decisions, whereas letters can take several days to draft and then arrive in the mail. [...]
Katie Infantine, 17, of San Diego, [...] “Text messaging is really popular with my friends,” Infantine said. “So the fact a college would do that is really cool.”
Some may see this as a gimmick, but I think this is a fantastic way of generating buzz in high schools nationwide in the hallways, in a very personal way. Nothing like speaking to students with technologies they are familiar with.
Tags: acceptance, admission, admissions, creighton, creighton university, education, higher education, san diego, university
FaceBook - A Social Requirement in Higher Education
February 1, 2006 | 37 Comments
Facebook is a social site targeted at people associated with colleges and universities. Its popularity has gone through the roof this academic year, a quick peak at Alexa and you’ll see how drastically its rank spikes.
During the winter semester Jenny was taking a class. A fellow student contacted her and informed her that she was the only one in the 15+ student class who did not have an account on Facebook. In fact, he was a bit annoyed at her for this and felt she really needed to create an account.
The level of involvement students feel with Facebook is astounding. This social software has become the preferred collaborative environment for them. By choice. Not by some academic decree or because people thought students needed to use it. They chose this product for themselves.
Wondering if this one example was an oddity and not truly indicative of an overall trend at Plymouth State or higher education in general? Casey got the following from Facebook: “There are 3,975 registered users at Plymouth State University. Like the other schools on the site, over 60% of them log in every 24 hours.”
That means approximately 2,385 users are logging in to Facebook each day. Our campus portal gets around 3,800 uniques daily and we make it difficult for students not to use that…
Tags: education, face book, facebook, higher ed, higher education, plymouth state, plymouth state university, social, social software, university, web 2.0
MooFlex
December 18, 2005 | 1 Comment
MooFlex is a CMS that may be interesting. What interests me primarily is their heavy AJAX usage. If this application is designed well, using modern web technologies, I am intrigued by its long term potential. As we look to find a CMS to convert our University to, we hope to have a great deal of flexibility in what we can accomplish. Some on our team have even gone as far as saying we want to create a Web 2.0 university site. We’ll see how close to that we actually get.
The company responsible for producing this is based in Italy and called mad4milk.
Tags: AJAX, cms, contend, content management, higher education, mad4milk, mooflex, university, web content, web development, web site, web20, web_20