A Survey of College & University WWW Sites

Final Project for TU5020

Computer Mediated Communication
Teachers College, Columbia University

The World Wide Web has a healthy amount of educational resources for the teacher and professor, but very little (if any at all) information for the administrator. As you know, the Internet originated out of the need for researchers to share data and was, until recently, predominated by educational institutions. Today, these institutions are nearly outnumbered by commercial sites on the WWW. The commercial sites continue to proliferate with great vigor and the WWW is becoming an entirely new marketplace. With this in mind, colleges and universities need to think about their digital presence on the WWW. Prospective students, corporate donors, foundation researchers, alumni, journalists, and others may visit the college for the first time via a college's WWW site and leave with a lasting impression of the institution.

As digital technology becomes more accessible, colleges and universities will create task forces and committees charged with the duty of creating, evaluating, and improving the institution's WWW site. In fact, we found several sites that were developed by university-wide teams in our survey of college and university WWW sites. The University of Southern California and the University of Texas at Austin are two examples of WWW sites developed by teams.

The goal in creating this site was to provide higher education administrators with valuable information that may aid campus discussions about their digital presence on the WWW. Since little research has been done about the digital presence of colleges and universities, on the WWW, we conducted a survey of the institutions listed in the American Universities site produced by Christina DeMello at the Massachusettes Institute of Technology. As of March 1995, the list of colleges from which the survey was conducted contained 489 institutions. The survey of these sites reviewed the following qualities: who created the site; the types of information available; directory services; and elements of hypermedia.

We have categorized the survey findings by the classifications determined by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The 10 categories were split into seven types of institutions for this study. They are: The survey findings are discussed by type of institution (using the Carnegie Classifications):

Our visits to nearly 500 college and university home pages allowed us to identify good & poor examples for many different elements within one site. For instance, we found a great example of an online magazine, and an alumni web site that had been carefully planned and implemented. We also found some sites that paled in comparison to others; these, we believe, act as a good learning tool for administrators who are charged with planning and implementing their institution's WWW site.

As a result of the survey findings, we identified emerging trends that will shape the future of college and university WWW sites and discussed issues that confront many administrators when molding the digital image of their institution.

Finally, we reviewed some commercial sites that provide students with information about colleges and universities and others who are in the business of creating WWW sites for institutions who are unable to create their own.

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[Home] [Survey] [Good/Poor Sites] [Trends] [Issues] [Commercial]

| Andrea Johnson | Wancheng Mao | Shawn Mishler | Vasily Popov |

last updated: May 22, 1995