"There is no question here of values. It is simple information technology being used by one community to reshape another one. It is this type of aggression that we exert on our own youngsters in what we call "education." We simply impose upon them the patterns that we find convenient to ourselves and consistent with the available technologies. Such customs and usages, of course, are always past-oriented and the new technologies are necessarily excluded from the educational establishment until the elders have relinquished power."
(War and Peace in the Global Village, 1968)
Rejoicing over the first serious feedback to my published report relinquishes all struggles in its quest for laying out a practical plan based on solid evidences. Another strategy paper will be loftier and leaves more room for interpretation and self-reflection. (For an example see the FASOS strategy report 2011-2015)
Now to the points raised in Martins email:
- Reading your report I got a bit worried by the numbers you show (FN 51). 57% think that the programme information is easy to find. 64% find it conveniently arranged. I consider this numbers quite low. If more than 40% have trouble to find information this is in my view a disaster.
It would only be a disaster if more than 40% of SBE students believed the “marketing speech” we produce largely for our self! But it’s a valid point and it will take some time to get through the layers here. Lets look at it from both sides: The overall number of Bachelor and Master students doubled in the past five years. The majority of which find jobs corresponding to their study in less than a year with an average salary second behind graduates of FHML (doctors!?). When asking students to elaborate on their motivation behind their application @ UM/SBE: 1. the close proximity to their homes 2. the good reputation of the school and 3. the prospects of a well paying job attracts their attention. And from this number 80% use the website as their prime source to dive into our specific offers. The student’s expectations do meet the reality! The majority of SBE’s student population is actually from “around here”! Yes the schools’ accreditation and ranking results speak for themself and are very good and Yes, the labor market shows increasing interest in our "products". This are facts that point me to the direction that students expectations and realities do meet here. But there is still the missbelieve that communication is cause of the disaster exemplified by the 40%. This a wrong interpretation of facts that demand sometimes more than "number chrunching". There is ample evidence that students expectations do match the realities in form of organized opportunity created by the school as well established environment! Furthermore, the market for prospective students is stable and new markets (new business segments particulary in ICT intense industries) are being developed by internationalisation and marketing efforts. The competition is not far ahead and SBE is regarding its online activities in the middle field (compared with national formal educational institutes!).
In a survey done by an external marketer students where asked about UM’s communication activities in general. (The UM Social media recruitment strategy, june 2010)The result: Every well adjusted youngster knows they are getting targeted with “marketing speech”. They are fully aware of being the product of a state supported (funded is now the wrong word since the decline in government spending on higher education in the netherlands) post-industrial education manufacturer. Designed like the programe (f.e. Human Decision Science) for a market consisting largely of private businesses. Lets imagine students for a paragraph or so as rational-self maximizes who do see the benefits and can deduce the associated costs of their study choice. After all, if I want to learn a single subject or lets say anything that SBE currently offers - in form of packaged knowledge- I don’t need to deal with all the dissatisfaction that goes hand in hand with formal education. All Self-Guided trainings in all subjects are available online for free. Expert lectures, interviews, books, study material by students, other people from around the globe who share my interest, user friendly tools to actually share information without prior technical knowledge, existing networks of experts and above all a mired array of online platforms or services are in place for free for everybody – that’s the environment every youngster is confronted with! A webmail system from microsoft with limits not to be found in services offered by competitior google. If you are used to a free gmail account you automatically look down to your email accounts UM offers its student population. Most of them are to young to experience what people above 40 do by way of nostalgia. The point is I don’t need to study at a university if I am interested in the subject. And I don’t believe the shiny-happy-people imagery of our brochures anyway. The times when universities had a defendable monopoly of knowledge are over. Education is not a privilege anymore than it was a leisure activity for a wealthy minority. As Peter Drucker rightly concluded in 1958 education today is a necessity of production. But if I want a well paying job and not become a call center agent f.e. than I need my graduation certificate. And who can blame students for beeing rational beeings?
I say here nothing about parents as an important factor of a student’s choice of study. They want the best for their kids and they like brochures with marketing speech and shiny images! There is always a need for that. But as far as I can tell students are aware of the role they play and motivated to digg out and expose themselves to our admission proceedures for the benefits they percieve as most important. So there are some limits to the one-way marketing approach. But they are detectable and nothing to worry about.
Overall I am not sure whether there is a positive connection between the number of applicants and subsequently admitted students and the online communication activities of the school. It is true that prospective students point to the website as their main source of information but it is equally true that the socio demographic background (Michale Hartmans study in “Der Mythos von der Leistungselite”. He elaborates on the interconnection between family background and success in your educational and working career.) of students as well as their parents’ income have a much more direct effect on their choice of study than does the level of interactivity, layout, structure or the information provided by the schools online presence. Just take a look at SBE's online activities of the past five years and try to explain why it is flooded with evermore students? The disaster here cannot be the result of the schools online communication channel.
When I came here I redid most of the bachelor and master program pages and if there are any complains they can be directed to me. They are as fine as one-way communication tools can be. The information is comprehensible and findable. Within the site and via search engines. Other parts of the website are now under construction and seriously need attention. The main point I wanted to make in the study was that SBE looses students because of the inconvenient admission process. It takes too long for SBE to come back to applicants who then move on. There is also another big group of enrolled students which leave because of other better offers or financial reasons. For them we currently use an exclusive Social network to enhance what marketing people call customer-loyalty. For the other group a close look on how the school can reorganize the admission process in such a way that reduces the waiting time of students and the workload of staff memberes is suggested ( in the final strategy report). But since this report's aim was to come up with practical recommendations the scope had to be narrowed.
- It is not completely clear to me what gives such an advantage to a facebook site compared to an ordinary website. If students search for a study programme, certainly they will also consult google and other platforms and not only facebook. The only thing I could imagine is that facebook gives the student immediately the feeling of joining a community. They can immediately communicate with other prospective students and are therefore more eager to join UM. This additional feature they do not get on the ordinary website. One problem, however, I experienced with social media (I consider the discussion fora on ELEUM also a kind of social media) is that rumours and wrong information start to spread easily. I give you an example. In the recent Economy Game, there was one guy who posted a completely wrong and actually stupid solution to an assignment on the discussion forum. I was not monitoring the forum closely, so it escaped my attention. The result was that in some groups up to 90% of the students produced the same bullshit. I also remember cases from the open days where some students told the prospective newcomers things like “Do not take Economics, it is only math,” just because they experienced it this way. What I learned from this is that these media have to be closely monitored (this is what you already suggested). It is like in a tutorial group. In principle the students provide most of the information but there is a tutor who takes care that the process is not getting off track completely. It is important to make this clear to the programme coordinators. I am afraid that this will not always work. How much time does Huub Meijers spend on these issues? I guess quite something. It is true, the involvement of the coordinator gives the whole thing less of a marketing touch (“Thank you for travelling with UM…”) but there is also a good reason for this division of labour. Our contributions to the facebook site are probably more to the point and a bit more individualistic. On the other hand we are also much more expensive than the marketing division. I am actually (and probably others too) quite happy about not having to spend a considerable amount of time answering easy questions from students.
Should a tutor be friends with a student on facebook? Was a serious question in the PBL tutor training I attended in April this year. The recommendation from the trainer was no. She said that it would not be appropriate but failed to give a solid argument. The “no” can be seen as her opinion. Now, lets apply the same principle to another level: Should a school be friends with prospective students or the interested public on facebook? Yes, but only if the marketing department takes care of it! No, I am afraid of… closely monitored… how much time… expensive… . Uff…. I am sorry. There is no reason to be dismissive of the power of the arguments in favor of centralized, stable, reliable one-way source of information provided by a marketing department on behave of the faculty for the audience. Except that the argument dismisses the reality. Facebook is not the product of Madison Avenue and neither is Youtube the ingenious epiphany of a wanna-be-marketer. They are unique expressions of a young populace looking for involvement and participation. PBL makes much of a point that one-way education does not work! So why should One-way communication do the job in times when youtube makes everybody a broadcaster. And facebook everyone a brand!
A facebook page has some benefits. It offers a very user friendly interface to connect to others, share information, images, pdfs, …. Without the need for much training. It also offers immediate insight into who uses it? How is it used? And it is for free. But most of all it offers the sense of community. It gives people the feeling that they are part of the program although they are not really part of it. They get the content but not the experience. This is the only thing that is left for a university once it realizes that it cannot charge for the content of its education – the xperience of studying.
Did you know that facebook offers also community pages besides the ordinary pages SBE is currently using? Yes, I understand that wrong information spreads easily and constant monitoring is more important than ever. But it is worth it and all your suggestions are considered in my report. Of course program coordinators get a training and clear instructions. One after the other programes with the exception of the "cash cows" IB. Numbers of applicants of other programes show between 9 and 34 students per anno. This is not much work for a coordinator provided the tool he uses is convenient enough. Their contributions will be individualistic and sometimes more than traditional marketing would permit itself. Coordinators will be supported by somebody from the marketing department and the pages will be monitored by a person with marketing experience. The idea is not that the coordinator is responding to easy questions but that students help students! The page is advertised to already existing students and to prospective ones alike. By bringing the two groups together and providing them with a space to communicate the role of the coordinator is more that of a facilitator of communication than a contributor.
• For reasons mentioned above, the rather open communication fora need to be complemented by a very solid, reliable and stable one-way source of information, a website without whistles and bells. I am seeing problems with all the satellite sites (those which exist anyway plus the additional ones in facebook, twitter, etc.) which will be (following Murphy’s law) inconsistent. So there has to be a sort of reference site which can be considered as the ultimate instance. This is naturally the faculty’s website, but I think that our faculty’s website is not yet ready to do this job (although better than several years ago). The available information is still not well structured. This is not to blame you but more the CMS they bought. I fully agree with you that the CMS causes quite some trouble. As I said already I consider the numbers given above dramatic. Another reason for the importance of the ordinary website is the fact that parents seem to play a substantial role. I guess that the fraction of facebook users among those who are 40 or older is much smaller.
Yes, the reference site is the most important one. And it is the main SBE website. As the gravitational centre for all online activities it is the most important. Is it ready for the job? Mmmmhhh... good question? I am always interested in comments and tips on how to improve it! But you are right, there are many flaws and little has been done to improve this situation. I can see the need for a major change of the overall structure of SBE’s main website but this will take some time! As I said earlier I doubt that this will have an effect on student recruitment activities for the bachelor and master programes.
The website of the UM is from the 90s. Its an electronic version of the brochures it publishes, nothing more little less. And the main reason why UM has a website is because printing brochures became to expensive. When you want to reach out to students form oversees it gets expensive. See, I use the same argument to talk you into facebook.When I say to people here that I am living in the stone age in terms of web development they laugh. I am dead serious about it. There is a definite lack of in house knowledge and expertise in these areas combined with a huge overload under which already ancient Rome collapsed - itself being the personification of a bureaucracy. There is no reason to assume that government spending on higher education will take on the levels of the 80’s as much as there is no reason to assume that the price of fuel will calm down to what it was before the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s just a fact and SBE is utterly bad prepared to meet the demands of students who will pay full tuition fee because they can and have to afford it. Who developes new business opportunities in the form of the successful executive master programes or online learning assets to be sold to companies here? If you go away from the website as the problem for future revenue opportunities the problems mount exponentially. But the problem here with regards to the website is simple. If I relay for everything I do on an external consultant who gets the job done for me, what do I know? Nothing. And most consultants I work with are former students who became contractors knowing full well what their clients know or better don’t know! Everybody is a manager and those who do work do it with stone tools which do not permit us to envision future services for todays executives. Under the weight of electric information paper tigers like SBE are doomed to experience the sort of dissatisfaction it does. There is no mystery here! If I have to justify myself for pocked money (around 50Euro)to purchase an online service for the school I will not do it. If I have to spend almost four hours to understand how the Request for Change (for the website) procedure works I might consider not to say anything at the next meeting. One can ask the question why is it so complicated? In the case of the website it is because it is owned by three different companies who own three different parts of it and thus need to be involved every time a single change across the entire website is envisioned. This takes a lot of time and these companies charge UM or subsequently SBE for it every time they do something.
So, there are many obstacles raised in your point that need to be addressed. But again, the problem is not communication or technology. The CMS is besides expensive only cumbersome at best but the causes are somewhere else. The good thing about well unstructured information is that it invites participation! For the rest I appreciate that you raised this point here. In particular for Post graduate education as well as the non-degree courses the website is not at all "well prepared"
- I suggest to introduce the social media in steps, one by one. Currently I do not see any advantage of doing all at a time. In contrast I am afraid that this will only lead to confusion (not among the students, but among the staff members). Although I am not really a friend of facebook, it seems for me to be the natural 1st step. This is also supported by your analysis.
I agree. There will be a test round and one by one we will start with it.
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