Welcome to the new year and the new term! As students once more fill our classrooms, halls, and parking lots (!), it is worth pausing to realize that the first doorway they crossed on their way into MCC didn’t front East Henrietta Road, West Henrietta Road, East Main Street or even Scottsville Road. In fact, you couldn’t find this doorway on Google Maps, but you will find it using Google. The majority of our students first entered MCC through our virtual doorway at <<https://www.monroecc.edu>>. So, we might pause again and ask ourselves: how well does that doorway represent MCC?
In 2006, Clifford Adelman, a fairly no-nonsense policy analyst at the US Department of Education for almost 30 years (and, therefore, more than a bit removed from high school), reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education on an interesting experiment he conducted. He chose 27 community colleges at which the majority of students were 22 years old or younger—in other words, community colleges much like MCC—and visited their Web sites. He adopted the persona of a high school student and asked himself a simple question: “whether I could see myself—as a high school student—anywhere on that page, so that I would know where to begin to find out about the basics.” Too often, the answer was either “no” or “not easily.” He also noted a profound lack of information for the parents of prospective students on most community college Web sites—even as we have seen the active role of parents in the college selection process continue to grow. As a researcher, Adelman used this brief experiment to model a suggested practice: “So, what should community college administrators and faculty members do to improve their Web sites? . . . adopt a student persona (high school, continuing, returning, transfer, international, continuing education), listing, in order of importance, what you want to know. . . . and experience what it takes to find the information.” He suggested this process would lead to significant changes to a community college’s Web site and to “smiles on arriving students’ faces.”
Last fall, we began a process quite similar to the one Adelman describes . . . with, perhaps, predictable results. When initially rolled out years ago, our Web site met students’ expectations. But, as any walk down an MCC hallway full of students rapidly texting, emailing, or Facebooking on their “phones” will reveal, their expectations for responsiveness, interactivity, information flow, and design have simply leapt past us. The college’s current Web presence also does not capture the dynamic, exciting, powerful, creative, and innovative experience that MCC offers each day, every day for our students. And, our engagement with students begins long before they enter our physical doorways, so our review of the college’s Website led to a clear conclusion: to keep pace with the needs of our students and to truly represent all that MCC is and does, we needed a virtual “extreme home makeover” for www.monroecc.edu.
Our goal is to have a new Web presence up in advance of the Fall 2010 semester, so this term, the design work on the revised web site is beginning in earnest. It is a significant undertaking, and its importance to how we reach and serve prospective and current students cannot be understated. So, at this point, we want and need your input. I encourage you to follow Adelman’s process and take on the guise of a prospective student (some of you may even want to ask your own children to take on this role). What do you see? What did you learn? What should we change? What should we avoid? Share your thoughts on the Wednesday Message blog.
Anne Kress
President's Office
01/27/2010 |