Tech Note: Evaluating Higher Ed Web Sites

When is Humboldt State University ranked higher than Vassar College? When a talented geeek tours the institutions' web sites and critiques them in a several-minute off-the-cuff review. Actually, time on Humboldt was spent on their "Giving" page, and the review of Vassar was on Admissions. Fair comparison? Yes, when the criterion is effectiveness of communication based on web design.

The talented geek is Nick DeNardis, who produces the short Flash clips on his own, with emphasis on the coding behind the web sites. Don't let this mention of coding dissuade you from visiting EDU Checkup: Live Higher Ed Web Site Review.

(Even if you have no technical knowledge of web site design and creation, you will find the tour informative. When Nick explains that "bandwidth matters" you don't actually have to be able to define it in order to appreciate his message to higher ed administrators.)

EDU Checkup is only 7 episodes old. Discover it now, in its first days.

An older cousin to the site is eduStyle, a little more than a year old and a site billed for "inspiration for campus web designers." Users on the site have opportunity vote on a campus web page/site as being "My Style" or "Not My Style."

Just for comparison's sake... at eduStyle, Humboldt State U's site was voted 6 positive, 0 negative. One of its comments: "this is one of my favorite higher ed sites on the Web. I like the simplicity and creativity of the design." (Vassar was voted mostly positive, with numerous sites and pages from the College posted.)

© 2008 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Benchmarking in Higher Education

These benchmarking consortia and companies serve higher ed (and some extend considerably beyond the higher ed community). Details are accurate to October 2008.

BearingPoint
This consulting company addresses benchmarking for the Higher Ed community in four areas: Human Resources, Research Management, Student Affairs & Services, and Strategic Financial Analysis. These areas display previous reports (years 2002-2005, for example) for public access; locate through "Library" links within the web site.

CHEBA: Consortium for Higher Education Benchmarking Analysis
Membership organization (no member fees) sharing the costs of research to produce benchmarking research for use in higher ed. Currently, CHEBA has about 55 institutional members, including U of Maryland, McGill U, and North Carolina State U. CHEBA is part of The Benchmarking Network, Inc., which claims 140,000 members and serves many business areas.

EBI: Educational Benchmarking, Inc.
With a client list of more than 1200 institutions, EBI serves a broad community including 2- and 4-year institutions, military entities, and online universities. Assessments are available in the areas of housing, student center, first-year experience, fraternity/sorority, as well as Education areas of Management, Teaching, Engineering, and Nursing. New Product: MAP-Works developed with Ball State for early intervention to students at-risk.

Primary Research Group
This firm publishes benchmarking studies and surveys for higher ed (as well as other concerns as disparate as hospitals and museums). Costs range from roughly $100 to $400 for higher ed topics. Prices are considerably higher in other areas (e.g., $1500 for a telecommunications study). Recent titles are Survey of Assessment Practices in Higher Education and Research Library International Benchmarks. Survey topics are broad enough to encompass Library Cafes and Student Retention (not combined in the surveys but it would be interesting to know if they should be). Sample prices:
College Alumni Relations Benchmarks $295 (Paper or PDF)
Assessment Practices in Higher Ed $110 (PDF)
Student Retention Policies $119 (Paper), $134 (PDF)
2007-2008 Survey of Distance Learning Programs in Higher Ed $129 (Paper), $137.50 (PDF)

© 2008 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Brief Survey of Instrument Costs

This brief survey of assessment instruments is based on October 2008 prices as advertised on the publishers' web sites:

ACT CAAP = $13 - $20
ACT Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency
Common use: Gen Ed

CARS tests = $7 per online test
Center for Assessment & Research
James Madison University
Sample titles:
Information Literacy Test
Quantitative Reasoning Test
Scientific Reasoning Test

College BASE = couple of bucks + scoring cost
Assessment Resource Center
University of Missouri
Common uses: Gen Ed, Teacher Education

ETS Major Field Tests = $25 - $30 per online test
Educational Testing Service
Sample titles: Biology, Economics, Music

GPI two administrations = $500 (ends June 2009)
Global Perspectives Inventory
[unlimited n for a limited time]

© 2008 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Investigating ePortfolio Software

Most institutions struggle with the challenge of software adoption as products (and pricing structures) change annually and learning communities across campus differ in their preferences for software. If there is not a strong history of making campus-wide adoptions, programs seeking ePortfolio software may have to rely on short demonstrations or (better) trials to compare software features of competing products.

From a data collection perspective, the most efficient ePortfolio would be fully integrated with a learning management system (LMS) and institutional data content management system. Functions of ePortfolios can include learning documentation, planning, evaluation, job-seeking; and uses include student presentations, program review, and institutional effectiveness. This broad scope means that at the same time that institutions adopt ePortfolio software and set standards for students’ use, administrators and faculty may also be establishing processes to extend to programmatic documentation, including faculty credential and performance reports.

Through web demonstrations and conference calls with vendors, the following questions permit comparisons among products:

• Cost to student, to university
• Cost, time of sysadmin on campus
• Server location (hosted or on campus)
• Accessibility (e.g., Section 508)
• Customization (templates), Branding
• Training, support for educators and students
• Standards sets (for national and state accreditations)
• Help Desk (cost, hours, provision by company/university)
• Length of access - by student to materials, to webspace
• Archiving (to support studies of institutional effectiveness)
• Practical limits of long-term storage
• Security of student products
• Copyright of student material
• Copyright of educator material
• Copyright of institution material
• Consultancy service for educators
• Rubric maker and other utilities
• Portability

© 2008 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

ePortfolio Inspiration

Aside from the stunning collection of student art works, the Otis College of Art and Design web display of ePortfolios serves as a model for institutional responsibility for such presentations. The school's directory links to some 65 pages of student products. Look for clues on the entries to guide your surfing. An ePortfolio that has had thousands of hits may be worth your time. A project with 45 hits probably means it is an unfinished (or even abandoned) product.

Featured ePortfolios can be clicked from the ribbon at top of page. The larger collection can be sampled with the help of tabs such as "By Category." While the emphasis is on individual products, some entries reflect learning communities within courses.

The Otis site excels in two areas of best practices for institution-sponsored web sites: copyright and protection of student identity. As is common for art schools, there is emphasis on copyright acknowledgments. Harder to maintain is protection of students. Most of the ePortfolios that I sampled offered web-based forms for contact with authors. I spotted only a few ePortfolios that displayed personal information such as an email address or mailing address.

Especially as institutions aim to help students in job searches, the online portfolio becomes a challenge: should it include standard resume data? Or is its exposure too great to disclose personal information? Many employment web sites mask the identity of job seekers but that standard is not universal.

[An academic portfolio should display a student's best works, not her home phone number, street address, primary email address, and enough personal details to invite attention. I had planned to list on this blog some of the collections of portfolios posted through academic depatments and programs. (And there are some great ones.) But as I reviewed individual sites to vet the URLs, I ran into too much personal information—enough that I was no longer comfortable with directing readers to the sites.]

© 2008 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

On dropping the e in e-portfolio

In a recent Campus Technology article on andragogy, Trent Batson* (of MIT) refers to student portfolios with an important aside: "we can drop the "e" before portfolio because we now take for granted that portfolios are digital."

Batson's commentary on andragogy and evidence-based learning begins and ends with ontology, the set of our fundamental assumptions about higher education. With insight into the role of technology, he neatly makes the case for the student portfolio as vehicle for the needed shift to student-centered learning, especially for adult learners. Andragogy has not had much play in higher education and Batson correctly places it squarely before us as the "better fit."

Although seemingly a small matter, Batson's assumption that we can drop the "e" from e-portfolio deserves more discussion. My experience is that the electronic portfolio is still a matter of debate on some campuses. Not among students, who routinely put Web 2.0 tools to use. Not among IT professionals, who understand the relative ease of either constructing or contracting for portfolio technology (either as a single platform or as a flexible collection of tools). Rather, the electronic version of portfolio continues to see resistance from some faculty and administrators. In this sense, resistance to the "e" illustrates Batson's main thesis that the ontology of higher ed "does not fit at all with the new nature of knowledge construction in a Web 2.0 world."

* Trent Batson, "The Institutional Path for Change in This Age: Andragogy, not Pedagogy," Campus Technology, 10/8/2008, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=68283

© 2008 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Campus Assessment Tool for Technology

There's always a tendency to not download the Full Report of a study because (a) the file will be big, (b) the text will be dense, and (c) one wonders if the material will ever be put to use, anyway.

Here's the exception: CDW-G's study report on campus technology and the accompanying 21st-Century Campus Assessment Tool. They can be put to use by campus administrators. Both can be accessed from the CDW-G Newsroom web page; they require a sign-in with email address.

The "Full Report" is actually a very digestible slideshow in a PDF file. The report's 31 pages are fast reads with excellent graphics to make results meaningful. A technology manager could easily select 10 pages to drive a discussion among staff.

An Assessment Tool is also provided so that a campus can compare its own resources to national results and (as stated on that web page) "gauge how well your institution is integrating technology into the educational experience, identify program strengths and challenges and establish future program goals. Results from the assessment will also help individual universities track campus technology trends over time."

© 2008 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Assessment Podcasts by the Teagle Foundation

The Teagle Foundation podcasts are 20-minute clips on the web on assessment topics, most from 2007. If you share assessment articles with folks on campus, the podcasts offer a different approach to catch their interest. Some speakers and their topics:

Richard Hersh on the CLA
Judith Eaton on the state of accreditation (perspective of CHEA)
Andrew Delbanco on the future of American UG education

And presenting what may be the most unusual story-telling about campus assessment, a Teagle web page is devoted to 6 episodes of The Amazing Adventures of Indigo Jones, Classical Archaeologist! (The exclamation mark is part of the title. Although it also suits my description as the most unusual....)

Teagle Foundation Grantees are described briefly on the web site, along with dozens of publications and resources. The philanthropic organization was founded in 1944 by Teagle of Standard Oil (now Exxon). Funding continues by his family.

© 2008 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Upcoming Conferences with Registration Deadlines

Conference notices sometimes scream This Will Sell Out if you read between the lines (and some will tell you explicitly). In the past week, I've reacted to three such notices [my reactions are embedded in the list below]. It's hard to keep up with higher ed conferences so the following list is incomplete, of course. I will admit to being drawn to only the most affordable so you'll see <$500 offerings.

TaskStream free Fall Harvest Dinner at IUPUI Conference
27 October 2008, 6:45p
Indianapolis, IN
[My reaction: I wish I were going! The TaskStream invitation reads, "...dinner, open bar, live music and a ridiculous amount of good cheer." The free dinner tickets are nearly gone but Lyn Cooperman, 800-311-5656 x259, will try to accommodate if you call by October 15. The IUPUI Conference closed registration last week so this note is of value only to folks already set to travel to Indianapolis.]

NEEAN: New England Educational Assessment Network
Fall Forum: How Assessment Improves Teaching and Learning
7 November 2008, 8:30a - 3pm
NEW LOCATION: Worcester State College, Worcester, MA
$130 includes breakfast and lunch
Registration should be received by October 24
http://www.neean.org

South Carolina Formative Assessment Conference
9-11 November 2008
Myrtle Beach, SC
$250 for 2 days; $150 for 1 day
Last day to register: October 31
http://www.scformativeassessment.com

SACS Annual Meeting
6-9 December 2008
San Antonio, TX
$425
Registration ends November 3
http://www.sacscoc.org/aamain.asp

Claremont Graduate University
2009 Stauffer Symposium on Applied Psychology
24 January 2009, 8:45a - 6:45p
CGU, Claremont, CA (near Los Angeles)
$45 professionals; $25 students
http://www.cgu.edu/pages/5808.asp
[My reaction: A $45 conference that includes Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi? Deal of the century. Sure enough, the web site states, "Seats are still available today. However, we do expect this event to sell out."]

Savannah College of Art and Design
MUSE: Measuring Unique Studies Effectively
8-11 February 2009
Savannah, GA
$300; Pre-conference institute $150
http://www.scad.edu/events/muse/2009

Texas A&M Assessment Conference
22-24 February 2009
College Station, TX
$175 + low-cost pre-conferences and roundtable
http://assessment.tamu.edu/conference
[My reaction: The lunch-provided "SACS Roundtable General Education Competencies: Reviewer Expectations" will undoubtedly sell out. Worth the $25 add-on.]

New Mexico Higher Ed Assessment & Retention Conference
26-27 February 2009
Albuquerque, NM
$85; pre- and post-conferences for $65 each
http://www.nmsu.edu/~NMHEAC

Association of American Colleges and Universities
General Education, Assessment, and the Learning Students Need
Network for Academic Renewal Conference
26-28 February 2009
Baltimore, Maryland
$400 early bird price by February 3
http://www.aacu.org/meetings/generaleducation

© 2008 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Tech Note: Comparing CMS Tools

Choices in content management tools are overwhelming. A web site called cms matrix reduces the overwhelm dramatically for folks who must sift through the hundreds of products to make an adoption. Based on vendor-supplied information, the web site does two things very well:

1 - display a comprehensive list of 950 CMS tools, and
2 - permit comparisons among the tools on system requirements, security, support, ease of use, built-in apps, and five other criteria (drilling down to 135 features).

Vendors keep their details updated and pay the site for the display of information. The display is in WebGUI, one of the vendors on the site. How did WebGUI gain that placement? It was the first CMS to sign on.

© 2008 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

VSA's College Portrait & Beneficiaries

College Portrait
http://www.collegeportrait.org

Project of VSA (Voluntary System of Accountability)
Sponsored by NASULGC (National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges) and AASCU (American Association of State Colleges and Universities)

Purpose = share reliable information about higher ed institutions in digestible format.

The primary audience is identified as students and families seeking to learn about universities and colleges. The important secondary audience consists of the higher ed community, the legislative community, and government agencies.

Through the voluntary system, schools construct a portrait and upload their data to the Internet. The portraits have these common themes: (a school's choice of) standardized test results, student learning outcomes, and display of standard statistics that permit comparisons.

As I read many portraits over the past week, I imagined who benefits from the collection that is promised to grow over years as more schools come on board and as the ones already participating add more detail, including test data.

Prospective students are reading other guides to colleges.

Prospective college students' families may indeed access College Portraits, more likely from schools' web sites rather than the VSA web site. The College Portrait logo will make the report instantly recognizable from one college site to another, which is a genuine service of the well-designed logo.

High school counselors and admissions advisors will probably put the VSA web site to best use as a convenient source of literally hundreds of short profiles. (Can't you imagine the number of printed PDFs that will be distributed in advising sessions this year?)

The higher education community itself is the greatest beneficiary of the effort in these ways:

1. College Portraits are a remarkable display of cooperation and flexibility by two large membership organizations (for planning) and their members (for participating). Regardless of a few missing states and some lag among the institutions that intend to be online, the overall image is of higher ed being on the same page in recognizing the need for accountability. Paired with the activity of independent colleges and universities in U-CAN, the message is promising for the future.

2. More difficult to articulate and demonstrate is the meaning of a College Portrait to the campus itself. I do not refer to public relations or school pride, which are more the product of rankings, anyway. Rather, the sheer fact of having a standardized published profile on its web site says to the faculty and staff, "we have to make public reports on what we do here."

© 2008 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Higher Ed Accountability: VSA and its URLs

There is much to applaud about the College Portrait program that represents a Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA) and I'll offer that applause this week. So, today's post merely gets the "location" issue out of the way.

I was aware that VSA's sponsoring organizations (AASCU and NASULGC) had selected "org" for the type of domain for this program, so I started with the obvious test of the URL*. Had the selection of URLs included singular and plural versions of the program name? It had. The web page is produced by either of these URLs:

http://www.collegeportrait.org
http://www.collegeportraits.org

But if a user types in the singular version with .com as the extension, the resulting page is the NCES College Navigator.
http://www.collegeportrait.com = http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/

And if the user types the plural version with .com, the result is U.S. News & World Report's Rankings (including colleges, grad schools, high schools, hospitals, and about a half-dozen more "best" lists).
http://www.collegeportraits.com = http://www.usnews.com/sections/rankings

One last test, singular with .net, produced the Princeton Review College Rankings.
http://www.collegeportrait.net = http://www.princetonreview.com/college-rankings.aspx?uidbadge=

URLs are becoming less obvious to users via google searches and intuitive hyperlinks (e.g., "College Portrait" proceeding directly to the correct page without a text display of the URL except, in some browsers, a preview of the URL at bottom of window). Add to that the growing practice of using a hyperlink to generate a search or to link to a web site's other pages about the highlighted word. In short, hyperlinking is evolving and is not as predictable as in the past. The problem with the URLs surrounding VSA's College Portrait site is that for a project aiming to promote transparency, there's an awful lot of web sites that may be accessed by anyone trying to type in a URL.

The positive aspects of the project will be highlighted starting tomorrow. (And there are a lot of positive aspects.)

* URL = Uniform Resource Locator, the unique address of a web page on the Internet.

© 2008 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Enhancing College Applications: CollegeSupplement

Portfolios coming and going. Web-based portfolios are a superior means of assessment—and they can serve that purpose at both start and finish of a college career. A new platform called CollegeSupplement displays high school students' multimedia content as supplement to their college applications. Samples on the new web site follow a template for a guided eportfolio of video and text. (A simpler display of only video can made, too.)

College applicants create their own video and either upload it to YouTube and embed the code in the template (free) or upload it to the CollegeSupplement servers (fee). Then, they direct admissions officers to the location through a code generated by CollegeSupplement. Applicants are not notified as to whether or when anyone uses the code.

The web site suggests that the "supplemental" information is an alternative to visiting campuses and interviewing for admission. The company acknowledges that their own servers display better quality video than does YouTube, and it also offers scholarships whereby students can receive full CollegeSupplement services free of charge. If YouTube is elected for video storage, the student can code it as "private" so that it is accessed only by admissions officers using the CollegeSupplement link. While young people are certainly aware of such privacy provisions on the web, CollegeSupplement responsibly underscores the option; personal data are likely in a college application video and could expose a student on the Internet. (Notice the run-of-the-mill youth-produced YouTube video: it is more anonymous than you'd expect. But a college application video is likely to announce the applicant's name, high school, town, and favorite activities, all of which make the person find-able.)

A BusinessWire release about CollegeSupplement describes some early adoptions (Michigan State University, K-12 districts) that may spur the institutionalization of "in-coming portfolios" by college students. Aside from introducing students to the concept of portfolio presentation, some great pre-test data are created. The post-test would be four years later in the form of the college exit portfolio, whether for assessment of course products or for employment applications.

© 2008 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

College Data on the Web: Unigo

The web is all about the long tail, and Unigo targets that vast area by asking the residents of the tail to submit the data. In short, college students profile their institutions and the web site serves up resulting narratives and ratings for reading by the public. The target audience: students, both those seeking new information and those eager to contribute information.

The site is still in beta and that was evident in the multiple attempts I had to make to log in. I'm glad I persisted over the site's launch week to visit several times and let the power of the young people sink in. The welcome message is to "find, review, and explore America's colleges."

Unigo describes itself as a "nationwide grassroots movement to get the truth out about college life" and it does provide opportunity for multiple truths, at least. I enjoyed reading a Brown first-year student's argument to a stereotype about her school; the articles throughout the site reflect a wide variety of voices. Blending social site features (My Unigo, My Profile, Friends) with content is ambitious but the enterprise has received good publicity in the mainstream press and enjoys backing by a private investor. CrunchBase data on Unigo explains the founder's background and lists current stats of 18 full-time editors, 300 on-campus reporters, and more than 15,000 student contributors to the community.

Putting the media to its best use: the videos. Some clips reside on the Unigo server and some are piped in from YouTube. Purpose varies. Princeton's coverage is dominated by student interviews (why I chose to come here...) whereas Texas Christian University videos are fewer in number but more diverse. There's a 2-minute video about TCU football (the purple is just as overwhelming on screen as it is in person, if you've ever walked the Fort Worth campus), several class projects on sustainability, and a remarkably conservative streaking incident (the streaker wore athletic shorts but astounded the crowd in the cafeteria, anyway).

The site uses the term rankings, but ratings is a better description of the stats. Some stats are institutional (percentage of applicants accepted/enrolled, etc.) and some are generated on the site. So, the TCU profile includes ratings (scale of 1 to 10) on such things as "Professors Accessible," along with the less noticed n for the survey data (37 on the day I visited that profile).

Ratings, comments, and videos can be sorted by most viewed, recently added, and most popular. Articles by editors and the editorial team address general topics, too, such as how to size a college and how to seek funding to college. Articles are rated although the numbers indicate most people merely view and don't vote (e.g., rating of 4 stars, rated by 1 user, viewed by 1,232 users).

© 2008 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.