The office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education (VPUE) hopes to complete a renovation of the Undergraduate Academic Life (UAL) website by the start of the 2012-13 academic year, VPUE Project Manager Tegan Bradford said. The renovation will include the creation of a new website for centrally located information concerning undergraduate majors.
Bradford set a tentative May milestone for launching the Approaching Stanford portion of the UAL site – the portion with information pertinent to incoming freshmen – for the incoming Class of 2016; but because no vendor has been selected, the timeline is tentative, she said.
The 400-page UAL site was most recently renovated in 2007.
“We hope that the site will be a useful advising tool and enable students to explore and plan their educations more intentionally,” Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education Sharon Palmer wrote in an email to The Daily.
VPUE drew inspiration for the new majors website from a Brown University site called Focal Point that aggregates information on each undergraduate major in an interactive display.
The Brown site is an attractive model because it allows students to easily navigate between the requirements for various majors and shows the names of advisors and the career pathways of alumni from each major, said Tenzin Seldon ‘12. Seldon is a member of the VPUE Student Advisory Group and The Stanford Daily Board of Directors.
“We want to find the means to be sure that some of the resources that the [Career Development Center] offers, for example, are used and employed,” Seldon said. “Currently, a lot of students are not able to really outreach to the CDC or only do it later on. Sometimes it’s a little too late.”
In order to better accommodate an interactive, visual display throughout the UAL site and on the undergraduate majors site, Bradford said VPUE plans to develop a simpler, more streamlined background in contrast to the current UAL site’s very red template.
One of the main goals of the UAL site renovation, along with creating a new hub for undergraduate majors, is to restructure the information architecture of the site from the most recent 2007 renovation, Bradford said. She added that analytics have shown that users are avoiding the site’s navigational structure by Googling what they are looking for.
“One of the goals at that time was to make it accessible for a viewer coming to the site who wasn’t familiar with our programs,” she said. “Instead of calling things by program names – Introductory Seminars, Introduction to the Humanities or Bing Overseas Studies–they rounded them into larger groupings.”
Bradford said she would like the new design of the UAL site to cut down on the levels users must click through to find relevant information and reorganize page groupings in an attempt to be more user-friendly.
“We would like to unpack some of that navigation a little bit and call some of our programs out by name to allow students to find them easier,” Bradford said. “That was one thing that was a goal in the 2007 version that I think, with the benefit of hindsight, might have been a bit of a miss.”
In addition to reorganizing the site’s navigation, VPUE is going to be able to pull more information from disparate sources across the University because the Registrar’s office is now providing departmental information in the form of Drupal feeds, Bradford said.
Because students have needs that span many University divisions including the CDC, the Vice Provost for Student Affairs and the academic departments, the feeds will allow the UAL site to serve as a hub for feeds from across departments and offices.
“The more we can collect things for [our students], provide things for them, that would be the goal,” Bradford said. “We’ll see how we do.”
Lance Choy, director of the Career Development Center, wrote about the relation of choice of major to potential careers in an email to The Daily.
“Many students are concerned about their career plans, and they often believe that there is a strong correlation between the major and a job,” Choy said.
“Perhaps for jobs that emphasize technical skills and knowledge like engineering, the major is strongly tied to the career field,” Choy continued. “[But] most business and public service jobs really do not focus on the major. Employers tend to think of individuals in terms of skills, experience and motivation.”
“We may not be able, because of time and technical constraints, to implement all of our ideas in the first version, but that way we can get feedback from students after the initial launch about what works and what doesn’t, and what additional features they might find useful,” Palmer said.