Jan
25
2009
Sometimes it’s important to step back and think beyond what we do everyday. For me, today is one of those days.
If you’re not a women’s basketball fan, you may not know who Kay Yow was. She was the women’s basketball coach at NC State. In early January she took a leave of absence from the team. Early Saturday morning she lost her battle with breast cancer. She was only 66 years old.
She was diagnosed in 1987 and lived over 20 years with the disease.
Coach Yow was an impressive coach, but it really doesn’t matter if she led her team to more than 21 NCAA berths or if she was a sub-500 Division III coach. By all accounts she was a great person who always put others before herself.
This topic is close to me for a couple of reasons.
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Jan
19
2009
Last week’s post concentrated on how we measure the success of our online course catalog. As I’ve stated previously, we do this with Omniture, but it can also be done using Google Analytics. This post is a practical guide to set up Google Anlaytics goals and funnels to track online form submissions.
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Jan
12
2009
The online course catalog is the place where prospects and students go to not only see what courses are offered, but what the prerequisites are, who the instructor is, how many seats are left and more.
The bottom line is the online course catalog is essential for higher education websites. Creating and maintaining a *usable* course catalog is as important. So how do you know if the catalog is usable?
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Jan
05
2009
A couple weeks ago there was a brief conversation on Twitter about how to measure the success of student blogs. This is an interesting discussion because blogs are different than normal websites.
The goal for most blogs is interaction (on every single page, usually) – not so with traditional websites like your university website (again, usually). This makes measuring success and analytics for blogs a bit different. Looking at visitor rate, bounce rate, path analysis for blogs is either a waste of time or not enough. Let me explain.
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