Technology Advisory Group

The website proposal group met on 11/13/2012 at 1PM. In attendance were: Kevin Wilkerson, Eugeniu Grigorescu, Sandy Pesavento, Teresa Conte, Kathleen Iacocca, and Jeremy Sepinsky.

The meeting agenda can be found here.

The discussion began with a recap of what TAG has learned, and the problems that exist regarding the current department webpages. See the above minutes for a detailed description. Some additional information that was provided by the attendees during the meeting:

1. The current guidelines for departmental webpages have no way of requiring continued maintenance of the department pages. The language address “encouraging” the faculty to update and submit content. When crafting this language, the faculty and staff involved debated whether they could make it stronger, but decided they could only request participation from the faculty members.
2. Some colleges have implemented “local” solutions. For example, PCPS has hired a Graduate Assistant savvy with the CMS to implement revisions as opposed to having individual faculty members update the pages.
3. While Admissions is very concerned with the website from a student perspective, it is important to realize that we need good PR from a faculty perspective as well. When departments are looking for a new faculty position the website can play a critical role in whether or not quality candidates apply for the job.
4. The current CMS, unfortunately, creates a barrier for the CTLE to help faculty update and maintain departmental or personal pages. The permissions structure requires the faculty to be present for updates, edits, and, particularly, publishing. Furthermore, the CMS preview rendering is NOT consistent with the final product that is displayed on a webpage. Thus, a Tech Con would be able to modify and edit a page so it looks good in a preview, but it will be changed when the faculty publishes. The number of iterations required to get a final, attractive product would be overly burdensome on the faculty.
5. There were debates as to whether the University got what it paid for in terms of the CMS. It was designed to allow faculty easy access to update their own pages, but it is NOT as user-friendly as hoped. In order to include the features that many people needed, the interface and design became too complicated for the casual user.

To summarize the problem that this group hopes to tackle:

• PR is not well-informed enough about faculty content to independently update the webpages;
• Faculty are neither taught nor incentivized well enough to update the site on their own.

Thus, we hope to develop a CMS-agnostic process that bridges the gap between presentation skills and complete content.

Previously on our campus, there have been two models for the update and design of the webpages, neither of which seem to have worked. The Webmaster model, and the Faculty Ownership model.

• The Webmaster Model
  • This model existed prior to the current CMS, where a person (or group of people; hereafter “The Webmaster”) was responsible for updating the pages with content provided by the faculty.
  • The Webmaster thus had the access and the skills to create and present the departmental webpages, whenever the content was provided by the faculty.
  • Unfortunately, the faculty did not often provide or update the information on the page, and the Webmaster was not tasked with actively seeking out that information. Faculty were not tasked with actively contacting the Webmaster with such information. Thus, many pages were not actively updated
• The Faculty Ownership Model
  • This is the model that is currently in place. The faculty have full control over their departmental webpages. The CMS was intended to provide easy access to the content producers (read: faculty), so they could play an active part in the dissemination of that content on the webpages.
  • CMS training exists for the faculty, and afterwards they are able to update the pages. But it is far from simple or WYSIWIG. The biggest problem becomes when faculty want to update the webpage later. Because they update infrequently, it generally requires faculty to relearn the CMS in order to re-update, which is really the big time sink.
  • Because of the learning barrier for the CMS, most faculty don’t know how to use it, and a departmental webmaster is appointed. There are still no clear expectations of the webpage, and faculty are often ill-equipped for creating publicly consumable knowledge, let alone PR materials. Thus, while the webpages may be more frequently updated, there is less useful content and an inconsistency in presentation which hampers PR efforts.

Thus, given this information, the faculty present feel that a Periodic Webmaster model might work best. Our group describes this as one where significant updates to the departmental webpages happen at certain times throughout the year. The Webmaster would solicit updates and/or approval of changes from faculty regarding certain parts of their department’s webpage. For example, faculty changes may happen in January and June whereas front page changes may happen in February and September. Each recurring facet of departmental webpages should have a deadline attached to it. This is not dissimilar to the model currently employed for course catalog updates. For departments that want more regular updates, there would be an avenue available for ad hoc changes, or even the possibility of continued faculty access to the CMS.

At the close of the meeting, the members feel that this plan is worth exploration and will begin to work out the details and logistics of such a process. This will happen over the course of the next few months.

As always: questions, comments, or suggestions are more than welcome. Email tag-member@royallists.scranton.edu, or comment below.