Visibility
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.
Campus Labs Pioneer Engage Implementation
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.
Many of the organizations and events in Pioneer Engage are publicly available, making Texas Woman's an attractive choice for prospective students.
Scholarship Process and Communication Improvement
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.
When a new first-year applicant is eligible for a merit-based scholarship, that prospective student sees the scholarship information and award amount on their acceptance letter, making Texas Woman's the easy choice.
A New Pioneer Portal
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.
Pioneer Portal is one of the first tools new Pioneers use as they first interact with Texas Woman's.
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:
- Pages per session increased 25%, indicating greater activity. Additionally, link clicks from within Portal increased 82% from July to August 2018.
- There was a 145% increase in visitors to portal.twu.edu in August 2018 over August 2017.
- Usage of the mobile-friendly, modern Portal theme increased: In August 2017, 7% of visitors used the modern theme; in August 2018, 38% of visitors used the modern theme.
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.
Panopto Lecture Capture
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:
- Ability to create lectures on any computing device from anywhere
- Full automatic indexing of all video and audio with easy search features
- Creation of captioning for ADA-compliance
- Simultaneous recording of multiple sources (e.g., microphone, presentation, camera, microscope, etc.)
- Full integration with Canvas and Blackboard
- Quiz integration into lectures with full control as to whether the viewer can proceed or not proceed in the lecture until the quiz is successfully complete
- Quiz results can be integrated into LMS grading or for review of concepts where quiz takers are having difficulty understanding
- Live streaming of lectures with a single click with chat for viewer questions or comments