Create a comprehensive strategy to increase the visibility and awareness of the University among all of our constituents (e.g., students, donors, medical community, alumni, faculty, staff, partners, government, professional associations, employers, media), and includes leveraging the value of our locations within major medical centers.
Pioneer Engage is an online platform primarily for student organizations and involvement. Students can search for organizations; find involvement and volunteer opportunities; and track membership and service hours. Organizations can maintain rosters, organization documents (i.e. constitution/by-laws, etc.), create forms, run elections, utilize the discussion feature, advertise events, and much more. The platform launched late summer 2018 and soon had 185 organizations set up. By census date, 158 public events had been posted. TWU Technology supported this implementation by securing the URL pioneerengage.twu.edu and enabling single sign-on authentication, allowing Texas Woman's students, faculty, and staff to access the service using their TWU credentials.
A significant factor students and their families consider when determining which university to attend is cost. To streamline communication for Texas Woman's most promising prospective students, Randall Langston, VP of Enrollment Management, worked with Technology to add the scholarship award amount to the first year student individual admissions acceptance letter. The project involved integrating data from AcademicWorks, TWU's scholarship management system, with the Colleague communication management module, as well as financial aid data to generate and display the award amount.
In viewing Portal behavior and analytics, Technology discovered that most users logged on to Portal and immediately accessed another tool (such as email or view bill) which requires an additional log on. Just in time for the 2018-2019 academic year, TWU Technology introduced a new look and functionality for Pioneer Portal. Portal has an updated menu to reflect a shift of primary functionality from Web Advisor to Self-Service. A new top navigation menu includes links to popular tools, including My Courses, Webmail, Service Center, Self-Service, Oracle eBusiness, and Colleague.
Through the addition of quick reference icons, Technology hoped to save students, faculty, and staff time. Clicking any of the buttons allows direct access to these tools without having to log on to Portal. Further, Technology added an action drop-down at the bottom of portal.twu.edu where visitors find actions to take, rather than names of tools. This provides an additional option for easy navigation to TWU’s most popular web-based tools and applications.
Reviewing the analytics from August 2017 and August 2018, access to and navigation of the most popular Texas Woman’s online tools and applications has improved:
Perhaps the greatest measure of success is the decrease in bounce rate at portal.twu.edu comparing August 2017 to August 2018. Overall, the bounce rate, the percentage of visitors who navigate away after viewing only one page, decreased 89% between these two time periods. This demonstrates that visitors are finding what they need before they log on to Portal and the redesign is effective and successful.
Since offering the increasingly popular lecture capture as a service, Tegrity has been our provider. Due to changes in Tegrity pricing, Technology needed to find a better value for the university.
Through a year-long review of the various lecture capture providers, Panopto proved to be a cut above the rest. The Office of Technology selected Panopto for many factors, including ease of use, features, and cost. The Office of Technology, along with Teaching and Learning with Technology, briefed and demonstrated this product to Academic Council, who shared very favorable remarks and concurred with the change. Key features include: