Ken Steele continues his review of recent winners and sinners in higher ed social media, this time looking at orientation week highs and lows.
It seems as though sometimes O-Week brings out the worst in students, who then seek to document their exploits on Instagram and Snapchat. In Sept 2011, it was students from HEC Montreal donning blackface to imitate Usain Bolt. In Sept 2013, it was Frosh Chants at Saint Mary's University in Halifax, and at the Sauder School of Business at UBC, seeming to advocate the rape of underaged girls. In 2014 it was Engineering Orientation songbooks that surfaced at Concordia University and McMaster. The pattern seems predictable now: outrage, recriminations, apologies, resignations, sensitivity training, counselling for upset students, and a fact-finding investigation. In July 2014, a young entrepreneur started promoting Ottawa Frosh Week Kits with hyper-sexualized videos encouraging "bad decisions with good friends" and excessive consumption of drugs and alcohol. But we did find at least one O-Week social media winner: Wageningen University in the Netherlands, which staged a student event with 1,000 smartphones to capture the entire campus for a "Student Street View".
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In this week's 7-minute podcast, Ken Steele summarizes a variety of low-tech and high-tech ways in which universities attempt to bring a virtual campus to the largest PSE trade show in North America, the Ontario Universities' Fair.
At #OUF2015, many universities use large campus photography or ever-larger video displays, capped off with Trent University's "jumbotron" screen. For several years now, Laurentian University has recreated their campus in miniature in their "5D presentation room." This year, Wilfrid Laurier University added a large touchscreen "virtual map" of campus to their exhibit, and UOIT partnered with Oculus Rift to deliver a virtual reality campus tour for the first time. Although virtual maps and VR helmets do give a good sense of the physical buildings on campus, they still need to bring to life the faculty and students who inhabit the campus. St Francis Xavier University had a good idea when they brought a live video wall to the OUF a few years ago, allowing prospective students and parents to interact with faculty and students in real time on the StFX campus.
Subscribers to Ken Steele's free email newsletter, the Eduvation Loop, got access to the complete episode 9 of Ten with Ken more than a week early. For exclusive preview access to future episodes, be sure to subscribe to Eduvation's "in the loop" email newsletter, at http://www.eduvation.ca/subscribe/
In this special extended 15-minute episode, Canada's most trusted higher ed monitor and futurist, Ken Steele, returns to North America's largest PSE exhibition, the Ontario Universities' Fair. Attracting about 120,000 prospective students and parents each year, the OUF is the second-largest annual event held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.
Ken spent two full days onsite, capturing the university exhibits, contests, and viewbooks, and interviewing front-line recruiters, deans, presidents and others about the latest trends and news.
In this episode, we review how the OUF has evolved in its 19-year history, how exhibits and staffing have changed, how the audience has expanded, and how the questions posed by prospective students have shifted toward a focus on experiential learning, mental health supports, and career prospects. We'll also hear why the OUF seems so important to university presidents and staff.
The episode ends with a sneak peek at the other 12 hours of footage, which will be featured in upcoming episodes of Ten with Ken. (And, as usual, stay tuned for a couple of bloopers after the closing credits.)
For exclusive preview access to future episodes of "Ten with Ken", be sure to subscribe to Eduvation's "in the loop" email newsletter, at http://www.eduvation.ca/subscribe/
On The Radar: In September 2015, the world's highest-trafficked pornography website, PornHub, announced it was launching a charitable foundation, PornHub Cares, with a $25,000 college scholarship. Eligible students have to submit a 5-minute video explaining how they seek to make others happy. Also this fall, hookup app Tinder released its ranking of American university campuses based on their ratio of "right swipes" - the hottest males seem to attend private Christian colleges and military academies, while the hottest females were at campuses in the deep south.
Social media winners and sinners: Ken shares a few examples of the best and worst in higher ed social media from his keynote at the 2015 PSEWEB conference. Sinners range from Nobel-prize-winning biochemist Tim Hunt and his ill-advised joke about "girls" in the lab (and his botched apology), to Rick Coupland's violently homophobic Facebook post. In response, though, some winners appeared, like the #DistractinglySexy viral campaign, or the NoHomophobes.com campaign at the University of Alberta.
The Big Picture: Like it or not, libraries are moving paper books into underground storage vaults and textbook publishers are rushing to embrace access codes that defeat the most common student efficiencies (photocopying, piracy, sharing, buying used, borrowing from the library, etc). What's promising are the institutions bundling textbooks into student fees, often providing free iPads in the bargain, like the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, College Boreal, Olds College, and more. Some studies have found that 77% of students don't even buy mandatory textbooks - so small wonder that Algonquin College is finding substantial improvements in student learning and success when etexts are provided to 100% of students. Since the government of California committed to creating free, peer-reviewed open-source online versions of the textbooks for the 50 top college courses in 2012, the governments of British Columbia and Manitoba have followed suit. We're likely to see a lot more provinces jump on the bandwagon to score political points on the cheap.
Stay tuned after the credits for a few bloopers, as well!
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Canada's most trusted higher ed monitor and futurist, Ken Steele, finally explains the metaphor of Brand Chemistry™ for higher education marketing. He summarizes evidence that students are more sleep deprived than ever, connects the issue to mental health, and outlines some solutions campuses have tried to implement. And, he explores the plight of adjunct and contingent faculty, who can earn more writing essays for cheating students than they make grading those papers for universities.
Canada's most trusted higher ed monitor and futurist, Ken Steele, reviews some new developments from Coursera and EdX, the evolution of visual identities for Canadian religious colleges and affiliates, and some apocalyptic projections for the future of the labour market.
Canada's most trusted higher ed monitor and futurist, Ken Steele, reviews a few examples of recent developments affecting gender equity on campus, continues his survey of college rebrandings with a look at those given new university status, and explains LinkedIn's new plans for world domination.
Canada's most trusted higher ed monitor and futurist, Ken Steele, completes his review of trends in visual identity design at Canada's colleges, looking at rebrands for NorQuest College, New Brunswick Community College, La Cité Collégiale, Sheridan College, Fanshawe College, Georgian College, and SIAST (Saskatchewan Polytechnic). He also sums up the 5 Signs a Brand Needs Refreshing, and 9 Colleges that may be Due, as well as predicting 6 Traits New Brand Identities will Likely Share.
Canada's most trusted higher ed monitor and futurist, Ken Steele, begins his review of trends in visual identity design at Canada's colleges looking at new brands for Lethbridge Community College, NAIT, Red Deer College, College of the North Atlantic, University College of the North, Niagara College, Sault College, Northern College, Mohawk College, Langara College, Douglas College, and Vancouver Community College.
What were the ten biggest headaches confronting Canadian higher education leaders and public affairs practitioners in 2014? In the final part of a 3-part series, Ken Steele reviews the 2 biggest headaches confronting Canadian college and university public affairs practitioners in 2014: the endless debate over Trinity Western University's new Law School, and the story behind the story of the University of Saskatchewan's TransformUS plan, and the media relations debacle that cost the president, provost, and others their jobs. And he sums up some lessons learned!
What were the ten biggest headaches confronting Canadian higher education leaders and public affairs practitioners in 2014? In part 2, Ken Steele looks at self-inflicted headaches including Labour Negotiations at University of New Brunswick, Mount Allison University, and University of Windsor; Expense Accounts at Red River College; and Executive Compensation at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.
What were the ten biggest headaches confronting Canadian higher education leaders and public affairs practitioners in 2014?
In part 1, Ken Steele reviews some acute headaches caused by campus crises and crime, data hacking, protests and fraud, including: Bomb threats at SIAST and Red River College, Shooting at York University, Stabbings in Calgary, uWaterloo applicant data exposed, Western student hacks CRA, UBC student banking data exposed, UNB student union website hacked by ISIS, Divest McGill, University of Toronto petition, University of Victoria faculty divestment, UBC faculty referendum, Divest Dal at Dalhousie, Capilano University, York University billing frauds, and the UBC Dentistry fraud.