Tag Archives: mobile

Using Social Media And Mobile for New Student Orientation

Summer orientation programs for many universities have either started or about to start. These orientation programs introduce incoming students and their families to the university through a series of events and activities. Universities can take advantage of mobile and social media to enhance the orientation experience of these new students.

According to a study released in April 2012 on mobile internet use by Pew Research, 46% of American adults (18+) own a smartphone.

The research organization comScore estimates that 30% of mobile users, with almost 40 million in the US, access social networking sites daily on their mobile phones. Orientation programs can also benefit by using these technologies to gather attendee feedback as well as for their staff to document their experience.

Listed below are a few ideas to start with and I would love to hear your ideas as well.

Customer Support

“Listen” to conversations on social networks related to your program. Use Google Alerts to be notified either via email or to an rss reader when keywords you define appear on the web. Another site to use is SocialMention.
Answer questions on a facebook page or create an account/ hashtag on twitter for attendees to follow and use.
Provide real-time information such as change of venues/schedules.
Provide guides to attendees such as schedules and map for mobile devices. An example is Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) use of Guidebook.

Marketing

Use Location Based Services (LBS) like Foursquare and SCVNGR to encourage attendees to visit locations and post photos/comments about your campus. Boston University and Dean of Students Kenn Elmore is one example.
Share facts/info about your campus using social networks such as Pinterest and Facebook. Here are some examples of how universities are using Pinterest.

Community Building

Use groups or facebook apps like Inigral Schools App to provide attendees the forum to connect based on interests and demographics. Providing new students the opportunity to connect even before they attend orientation makes their experience more comfortable as they already know other students.
Software like OrgSync provide universities to build communities amongst incoming students as well. In addition, orientation staff can communicate with the students via email and text messages as well as collect feedback from orientation leaders and students alike.
Utilizing student leaders as social media ambassadors is a good way to welcome and introduce incoming students to the campus.

Event Coverage

Staff and attendees can use twitter backchannels to ask/share additional information related to the topic discussed at the events. Through the backchannels, Orientation staff can also get some feedback on how the attendees perceived the events.

Document Events/Experience

Orientation staff (including students) can document their experience, lessons learned for assessments and future staff using blogs and wikis.
Curate attendees’ comments/feedback/experience provided on various social networks using Storify. Christopher Conzen (@clconzen) uses Storify to document his NASPA Region II MidManager’s Institute experience.

General Campus Info/Other Uses

Provide campus mobile websites to campus services, maps, academic information (schedule of classes, course catalog) so attendees can browse while they are waiting for events and while they are registering for courses. Browse through a higher ed mobile directory by Dave Olsen (@dmolsen) to get an idea of how universities are using mobile.
Provide staff with mobile devices and mobile applications to conduct business away from their desks. These could include: check-in/check-out, access student information, communicate with other staff (via text, email, twitter, etc), access to schedules and other program info.

Orientation programs are where new students get introduced to their upcoming university lives and academic careers. Campuses should use this opportunity to educate the students with the concept of digital identity and how their activities online can have both negative and positive impacts on their careers, rather than waiting until they are about to graduate from their universities. Eric Stoller (@ericstoller) introduces this idea on his blog post Digital Identity Development: Orientation and Career Services.

While I offer some suggestions on using social media and mobile for Orientation use, I am cognizant of the fact that not all students have access nor the resources and familiarity to utilize these technologies. Orientation programs should use these technologies appropriately and not severely disadvantage some students by not providing the essential services to all.

What other ideas can you suggest?

New School Year, New Opportunities – Exciting Times Ahead!

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School year just started and I am excited, really excited and optimistic about the prospect of what my team and my organization can accomplish this year. We’re going through perhaps the biggest project our department has ever undertaken, the conversion of our mainframe-based student information system to .net environment. This project is in addition to multiple enterprise projects throughout the entire Student Affairs division. With the decreasing budget and changing demands and expectations of our customers, technology have become more central to the operations of the departments. Personally for me, I am excited with the challenge and opportunities of merging consumer technologies (social media, cloud computing, mobile) with enterprise IT. I think the last time I saw this much shift at work is back in the mid-1990′s with the advent of the web. There were paranoia about security, employees wasting time on the web, or if web was of even any value to our organization. But just as I am seeing the same fears and concerns, I also see the same curiosity, grassroots adoptions and even some level of formal institutional adoptions of these consumer technologies. The reality is that the demographics of those we serve in student affairs have changed and along with these changes are the expectations of more agile, more open systems.The students we serve are far different from those in the 1990′s. Our students grew up with technologies that we did not even envision back then. The rise of social media as we know it now, arguably, could be traced back to when friendster came to existence in 2002. The creation of facebook in 2004 and twitter in 2006 further changed the social media landscape. With the increased and more robust wireless infrastructure and cheaper mobile devices, the way our society communicate is far different.

I wrote a blog post a few months ago that for social media to thrive in our institution, it has to be formally adopted. Since then, our organization has created a formal position to coordinate divisional efforts to advance the adoption of consumer technologies. Just as I had suggested in the same blog post, our organization has created a productivity/security group composed of individuals representing different perspectives to properly assess the integration of these technologies for business use and to address the challenges of accommodating the needs of individual users for flexibility with the needs of the enterprise.

In addition to social media, my team has begun to explore and develop mobile web sites. Using the UCLA Mobile Framework, we are exploring how we can use it within our existing content management system. Personally, I have learned a lot the last few months on the principles of mobile web development. I truly believe mobile devices has begun and will continue to significantly alter how universities do business. By taking advantage of the features of mobile devices such as geolocation, multiple inputs (QR Codes, NFR, location, gestures) and the fact that they are widely available even in the poorest sections of the world, in my opinion, more and more business transactions will be conducted via mobile devices.

Just as it was in the mid 1990′s for me when I woke up with a book about web development in my hand and go to sleep with it, going to sleep at 4 am, spending every night learning about how to develop web applications, I find myself in the same situation now. I wake up every morning to find some new knowledge via social media, new ideas I want to research, new applications I want to build. I go to sleep with ideas in my mind on what technologies mean to me, to my work. It truly is an exciting time and I’m just enjoying the ride!

Trends in Student Affairs Technology: Implications to IT

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photo by esharkdesign.com

There are many articles on the web that predicted the convergence of consumer technologies and the enterprise, often referred to as consumerization of IT. This is a trend that was offered by Gartner as early as 2005 and as this blog post suggests, consumerization of IT was born when IBM PC was announced in 1981. Higher education, including student affairs, is faced with the reality of having to adapt to the new demands of technologically dominated world. This new reality are driven by 1) student population and younger workforce who grew up in the age of internet and with the expectation of open access to internet resources, 2) increasing budget cuts and external mandates leading to re-organizations and reliance on technology for automation, 3) more technology choices provided to the workforce via consumer technologies/services like social media, cloud and mobile computing 4) faster pace of changing technologies and adoption of these technologies by business units with or without IT involvement. The pace by which student affairs business units embrace technology, specifically consumer technologies, in my career, is comparable only to when I started working as a web developer for student affairs in 1996 when these same business units started realizing the value of the web. Below are some personal observations from the last couple of years as a technology service provider in central student affairs IT.

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