Most likely if you haven’t already implemented a content management system in your institution you will one day soon. The web is a crucial marketing channel for higher education marketers due to the rising popularity of online enrollment and engagement. With such a large target audience and a high number of content contributors, it is no longer viable or efficient to be running your website with reliance on IT, or highly technical individuals for website updates. As a result, more and more institutions are turning to content management systems as a solution. Implementing a CMS can sometimes be a complicated task, especially in higher education, so we’ve put together a list of our top tips for surviving a CMS implementation.

1. Make sure you understand what your requirements are before you start evaluating vendors. It is important when you are choosing a CMS that you are looking at solutions which have the core functionality that you actually need. Ensuring that you have chosen a CMS that fully meets your needs and can help you reach goals makes for a much easier implementation and training process. Doing a comprehensive analysis of what your organization actually needs, can help choosing your CMS and ultimately implementing it a much simpler process.
2. Don’t get more functionality than you need.  Many CMS solutions are much more complex or too simple for the goals that your organization wants to accomplish. Tools like these are a hassle to implement, and come with an ugly learning curve and often defeat the purpose of trying to make your web content management easier! 
3. Make sure your solution offers training and support. So you think you’ve chosen a vendor, but do they offer training for their solution? You should be choosing a content management system that is easy for non-technical users to pick up quickly and easily, but that doesn’t mean some training isn’t necessary. Choosing a solution that offers training to simplify the implementation process is very useful for a smooth transition, especially in institutions where multiple users across different faculties and with a wide range of web experience will be using the application. 
4. Have a strong website management process in place. One of the best ways to ensure a problem-free implementation is to make sure that you’re not entirely relying on your CMS to solve all of your website problems. If your organization doesn’t have a solid content strategy in place, then a CMS can only do so much to improve your web presence. It’s important that when your CMS is implemented you also have the content development strategy, resources and infrastructure in place to make sure it’s a successful initiative.

Image by Martin Kingsley on Flickr.

Social media and its use in the classroom is an enormous issue for many higher education institutions today. How social media can be used effectively for teaching, the challenges and possibilities that it poses, and successful implementation strategies are all hot topics for educators. To help give some insight into the social media and education landscapes, we've found 5 video resources to help educators get their minds around the issue social media poses.

How to Be a Social Media Change Agent from Harvard Business.

This interview from Harvard Business features Josh Bernoff, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research discussing social media and its effective use.


Social Media in the Classroom from San Diego State University

This video involves a series of interviews with students from San Diego State University discussing the use of social media in the classroom, its educational benefits and the challenges faced with its use.


Face It! Social Media with Intention: Online Presence 101 from Dartmouth

This presentation discusses how social media can help jump start graduates career search, and the opportunities available between social media and the emerging job market.



Social Media: The Possibilities and Challenges from CACommunityColleges

This video is from the CETC & CUE Online Teaching Conference and features a discussion about the possibilities and challenges available to educators who are using social media as a teaching tool.

We know that finding inspiration for a higher education web design can sometimes be difficult. Whether you are updating a current site, or planning an entire redesign, ensuring that you get all the right elements for an effective site can be challenging. To help give you a creative boost, we've found 7 effective higher education website designs from around the world. Enjoy!

Emily Carr - Vancouver, CANADA

Let's start with Canada shall we? (We are located in Vancouver after all). Emil Carr's website has a nice clean layout and design, with bright highlight colors and rotating images on the homepage that emphasize some people of mention at the university and some of their artistic achievements.

University of Boston, Bostonia - Boston, USA

Bostonia is actually a micro site of the University of Boston. The website makes great use of large images and a magazine-style layout. 

Bournemouth University - Dorset, UK

Bournemouth University's website has another very clean layout with lots of whitespace, bright accent colors and easy-to-use tabbed navigation.

Queen's College, University of Melbourne - Melbourne, AUSTRALIA

Queen's College is part of the University of Melbourne and the website has a colorful eye-catching design, and is the best on our list in terms of social media integration on their homepage. The site does an excellent job of pointing potential students to their social media accounts especially Flickr.

National University of Singapore - SINGAPORE

The National University of Singapore has another simple layout, with easy navigation for university news, upcoming events and galleries and good social media integration with a link to the university's Twitter feed in the main body of the page.

Universidad Europea de Madrid - Madrid, SPAIN

This website has a nice image rotator that depicts several of the degree programs available at the university and it makes a pleasing use of dark colors in it's design, the only website on our list to do so. The homepage also has clear social media links and a detailed news feed. For optimized usability, the site  has obvious links at the top of the page to the webpages for other languages for the benefit of  international students.

Saxion University of Applied Sciences - Deventer, NETHERLANDS

Saxion University has the most minimalist layout on our list today. Despite it's simplicity, it maintains great consistency through the site and has nice bright hover states for the top navigation. The only drawback of their no-nonsense design is their lack of social media links, even though the university does have at least one social media account @saxion on Twitter.

With education budgets getting tighter and tighter, and the number of responsibilities and possibilities available for university web departments growing, the typical work load for higher education web professionals has dramatically increased over the last few years, and it doesn't look like it's going to slow down anytime soon. On top of that, the newer applications like mobile web marketing and social media are continuing to become more popular and education websites are under more pressure than ever to compete.

Most universities know that to stay competitive on the web today, an institution needs a dynamic website with significant social media functionality to ensure that your website is up-to-date, that your content is fresh, and that you provide web-savvy students the information they need in a format they like and recognize.

More often than not, the answer to getting your website to the level it needs to be at is to introduce a web content management system (CMS). An effectively implemented CMS can help you create and edit your content quickly and easily, keep your website relevant and the distribute the content development workload so it is no longer in the hands of and over-worked IT or communications department.

Sounds like a good idea, right?

If you think a CMS might be right for your higher education institution, here are a few tips on how you can choose the right CMS to meet your needs:

1. Define organizational goals. Once all the stakeholders in your institution are ready for the change to a CMS, it’s important to define the key goals of each department, faculty and the institution as a whole and  to communicate those goals between the future CMS users. Once these goals have been established, you can start deciding what functionality can help you reach those targets, and how you will track them to measure your success.
2. Prepare a new content strategy based on distribution. Your new content management strategy will be based on a distributed model rather than a centralized one.  One of the most beneficial features of a CMS for education is that it puts content creation into the hands of multiple individuals rather than one web or communications department. However, this will affect your content development strategies and plans, and will require communication/training on proper content development so that you can ensure you have proper brand consistency in place and that you understand how you are going to define workflow and approvals across departments and how you will maintain scheduling ownership.
3. Do your research, and understand what you need. It is important when you are evaluating vendors that you are looking at solutions which have the core functionality that you actually need. Many CMS vendors offer products that are much more complex, or too simple for the goals that you want to accomplish. Before looking at possible solution, it is a good idea to do a comprehensive analysis of what your needs are as an organization based on the goals you defined earlier. Choosing a solution that has the correct functionality to meet your website’s targets can ensure that you end up with a product which effectively meets all of your organizations needs. 
4. Don't focus solely on the technology.  The most important feature of a CMS is that is allows non-technical users to edit and create content more easily. To focus solely on the technological aspects of a CMS rather than the user experience it provides, is counteractive to your goals and the benefits of implementing a CMS in the first place. Make sure that when you’re choosing your CMS you focus on the product's user interface, support system, help and the overall user experience, rather than the more technical aspects (although those are still important).

Bonus tip: another final point that I'll add that can be beneficial depending on the size of your institution, is to choose a vendor that offers a solution which is targeted specifically towards the higher education industry. These CMS products can have additional education-specific features that more general content management systems don't provide,  which can help make your site more appealing to your target audience and lower implementation costs.

Being an education communicator is never easy—especially when faced with trying to engage today’s breed of technically savvy students. Many communicators are having a difficult time reaching out to constituents, students and alumni alike as larger portions of these groups turn to social media instead of the traditional media, still used by many institutions as their main form of communication. In this difficult environment innovative communicators are taking advantage of social media to reach their audience on a whole new level and are having measureable success.

So how do they do it? Take a look at how social media can be used in education to supplement your current communication strategies:

Twitter – A free micro-blogging site which allows users to enter 140 word or less posts known as “tweets” which are then published to the user’s profile page and are visible to their followers. Twitter is hugely popular and appears to only be growing.  A recent study done of students found that over 20% of students use Twitter, and of those, over 71% stated that they expect to increase twittering during the upcoming school year.

So how can you use twitter in education? Twitter is a great place to post pointers to online resources; school and class updates; and student reminders, and it also offers a way to get instant feedback about lectures, school related issues and news. Schools that have experimented with Twitter , have found that is has been an excellent way for students, faculty and staff to communicate with each other.

YouTube —The number one free video sharing site on the web with over 40% share of the online video market. Millions of videos are watched daily on the site which contains mostly user-generated and uploaded content.

The implications of YouTube in education are huge. YouTube can be used to enhance distance learning, to upload supplementary lectures and information like news reports; to contextualize an issue with video examples; to provide screen capture videos for demonstrations and can be easily embedded into lectures and presentations to provide interest.  YouTube now even has a separate site specially targeted for education videos.

Slideshare —A social site which allows users to upload PowerPoint presentations that are freely available online and easily embeddable for others to make use of. The site has many community features like tags, comments, communities and related slidecasts. I think the benefits of this one are pretty obvious: lecture material can be easily disseminated, students can locate other presentation s on the same or similar topics and teachers are able to build up a library of online resources.

Facebook Fan pages —A social networking site where users can add friends and send them messages; view their photos and updates; comment on updates; join networks of other users and send out notifications about themselves. Facebook Fan pages can be used as an open communication forum for students and faculty at an institution. The page can contain photos and videos from and about the institution and information about events, news, and important issues that are relevant for those who are members. Many schools have excellent Facebook Fanpages and are certainly taking advantage of what those sites can offer to their students.

Image by funkandjazz