The following are links to tools of resources that could help us help students find what and where to study. Some are specifically designed for aspiring tertiary students (whether they direct to our institution is another matter), others are examples form other domains that have an approach that could be adapted or translated to our domain.
- No major drama: By far the best tool I have seen to help students decide what to study. Not only could we offer (something like) this but we could borrow some of the ideas (visual representation of earnings or employment, career content, subject descriptions, etc) for WIPII. Can take a little while to complete the exercise (depending on how many interests you start with). Is it so good because it was built by young(er) people? Was it well funded? Wonder what they plan to do with it now? Maybe we should speak to them?
- Which Course Where: A valuable and data rich site but sooo ugly (when compared to No major drama) and dated. Maybe it is what I expected from a stats division in a government department. All they seem to have done is place a query form on top of their existing data stores. Probably no UX work. Little design.
- Studyinnewzealand.com: A fresh/clean site (responsive and maybe even mobile first?) targeted at overseas students considering NZ as a study destination. Could we obtain their "Area of Study" to subject mapping? Disappointing how the results are always ordered alphabetically, rewarding AUT ahead of most other institutions. Here is the uni section.
- CareersNZ: good home page that invites me to look further; but still text heavy and that means a lot of reading; little use made of targeted searching (based on answer I give to questions); better finished than above but still text heavy
- Tertiary Education Commission: Followed some links to get performance data on institutions (as the TEC research showed this features in future students decision making and found useful data (see Vic example here) but hard to compare institutions (is this intentionally difficult?). Not sure if Vic would want to quote this in case it gets students looking elsewhere, but research shows it is an important factor in the decision of what and where to study. Could do same with research indicator if postgrad audience.
- Earnings after graduation: Interesting data from the MoE, but better represented in the next site reviewed.