Why a beautiful campus but a digital wasteland?

Brian Hawkins@iuxc

My background

Joseph CampbellThe Hero with a Thousand Faces1949

Our hero is called to adventure

Goes from Mundane world to one of Adventure

Is given knowledge

Is tested and tempted

Confronts a nemesis

Journeys back to the old world, transformed by experience

This is the college experience!

NEXT: History of colleges

The 17-1800s were a period of tremendous growth in the US. Throughout that time, colleges were popping up all over the country! By 1880, Ohio had 37 colleges compared to 4 colleges in all of England.

As America’s population grew, so did it’s number of colleges.

But they didn’t all survive.

1861

1850

1840Fifth US Census: Pop 17M Colleges: >100

Sixth US Census: Pop 23M Colleges: ~150

Seventh US Census: Pop 32M Colleges: >200

Source: http://americanphilosophy.net/american_colleges.htm

Census numbers

1861Seventh US Census: Pop 32M Colleges: >200

600+ Colleges had

FAILED

Source: http://americanphilosophy.net/american_colleges.htm

Over 600 colleges did not survive!

Thomas Gaines’ book tries to answer why.

–Thomas A. Gaines

“In their haste to open these new schools, most administrations forgot that a concern for aesthetic vitality is crucial to developing any cultural center.”

4,599 Colleges & Universities

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_education_in_the_United_States

There are over 4,500 colleges in the US! How do students choose?What is their first impression of our universities?

60% Visual

Environment the Most

Important

Source: Carnegie Foundation

60% of college-bound students consider visual environment to be the most important factor in choosing their college.

The beauty of our campus, of course!If I want to go to the University of Alaska, and I live in Indiana, how am I going to learn more?Their website.

What the is this?!

What the is this?!

Our digital campus is becoming the gateway to our physical campus.

Our digital campus is becoming the gateway to our physical.

Let’s take a quick tour.

This is UCLA. It’s a nice campus. This is Royce Hall.

This is Haines Hall.

This is the law school. They have a pretty campus.

This is Harvard. We can all imagine ourselves walking through this campus, and it would be much like this. Gorgeous.

What about their digital campus? What’s an important tool for all students? The LMS!

The Learning Management System

The learning management system. So what’s it like being a student at Harvard? Can I find my digital “classroom” as easily as my physical classrooms?

Nailed it! Now let’s look at UCLA.

WHAT IS GOING ON?!

At least someone got this task right.

Digital strategy is no longer an option.

Relying on people to just “know” how to find something, or to google it is a bad strategy.

Over 60,000,000 page views.

Five major sites, since January.

What does our typical digital campus strategy look like?

1. Immediate need 2. Administration said to 3. Chance

Reasons we make websites:

This is bad. Very bad.

What would our physical campus look like if we used our digital strategy?

What if we had the same strategy for our physical campus?

How did we get here?

Let’s start with org charts.

Arts & Letters

Dean

Faculty StaffWEB!

Business School

Dean

Faculty StaffWEB!

Music School

Dean

Faculty StaffWEB!

Biology Department

Dean

Faculty StaffWEB!

Chemistry Department

Dean

Faculty StaffWEB!

German Department

Dean

Faculty StaffWEB!

Libraries

Dean

Faculty StaffWEB!

Academic Advising

Director

Advisor AdvisorWEB!

Information Technology

Director

Staff StaffWEB!

Athletics

Director

Staff StaffWEB!

Office of the President

President

VPs StaffWEB!

Office of the Provost

Provost

Staff StaffWEB!

Architect’s Office

Director

Staff StaffWEB!

A bunch of spread out developers does not a cohesive strategy make.

What did we expect to happen?

When we’re playing Choose Your Own Adventure with our digital campus, we are:1.) Costing our universities money2.) Negatively impacting our students’ ability to succeed

What if the departments that worked in our buildings were able to decide how to design those buildings?

We need to be fun! We can’t do this in the physical campus, but we can and are doing it in on our digital campus.

SAFETY: Point out fire hydrant.

We can’t solve them here today. I don’t have a solution for you. I’m just here to draw attention to the problem, and to the need to come together as a group and as individual campuses to figure a way out.

SPREADING OUT WEB TALENT

We need to STOP spreading our web developers out across campus and departments.

We’re looking at each site as it’s own entity. As a singular site that is loosely, if at all, connected to the schools, sites, and departments around it.

Over 60,000,000 page views.

This is no longer an option. We are now managing two campuses: The digital and the physical.

We are now managing two campuses: Digital and Physical

This is no longer an option. We are now managing two campuses: The digital and the physical.

We are looking through the wrong end of the looking glass.

Let’s aspire to digital campus beauty that matches our physical campus.

Brian Hawkins@iuxc