Programmes - meeting with student advisers

Meeting with Faculty, School and Student Recruitment reps who work with students

22/07

Terminology and requirements

Melissa – calendar is the official version of the truth for ‘major’ requirements etc.  Need for total accuracy (vs plain language). Last time marketing attempted to put a 'friendly' spin on major requirements content, it was a nightmare for the faculty. Students found 'holes' and misalignments between the sets of information. They ended up having to relax some rules for a whole cohort of students. 

Terminology – suggested glossary as a solution “Get people used to the terminology that we use” – said this is ‘absolutely vital’. (Anne unsure about glossary as a solution)

General –  Some kind of fast introduction to our navigation (location and purpose of main sections) or basic terminology could be useful.

Richard – terminology: they talk about ‘degrees’ when in schools.

Johan – the word ‘subject’ is used with students. But in their world, this is part of PG.

Richard – Careers advisors use the terminology they know from when they were at uni. therefore different at each school and often not VUW's version.

Melissa – the units within a school are called 'programmes' within FHSS (maybe other faculties?). Were previously called 'departments'  

Current site

Richard – Gets lots of enquiries after student can’t find something or get lost on the website. “Website is massive.”

Would be ideal to capture students when they are there – eg, register with the CRM. “Sign up and stay in touch” – for students who really are interested/ actually are prospective students.

Students moving between homesite and the older F&S sites  – confused. Duplicated content, different templates.

Nicole – Sees the students who know how to get help, begging the question of what is happening to the rest. Website: students go down ‘rabbit holes’ to pages, often on F&S sites. Can’t find where they were when they want to find it again.

Craig – Looks after first years – runs outreach for school. Also does pastoral care. “Want to increase our personal contact with school students.” 1^st years have said website isn’t useful.

Content

Craig – “Biggest problem is explaining what engineering is.”This might be because engineering at VUW is not like at Auckland and Canterbury.  [subject/topic content]

Their school has rapid change – eg, for specialisations – so need face-to-face with prospective students for degree planning. And they can bend the rules: “there is always an exception”. GUS and the calendar can't keep up with their changes. Lots of choice but students choose too many hard courses and fail. 

Key messages he’d like to get across: “Victoria is a personal place” / “We support you”. Thinks we aren’t communicating this right now.

Craig – profiles (features) really valuable.

Craig – nothing on our website for Careers advisors or Teachers

Melissa – reason why we refer to courses by codes not names is because it is currently v labour intensive to change the site when course names change (quite regularly). 

Degree planning

Melissa – BA course options – too diverse to show.

Nicole – with a BA, you don’t need to be locked down to a major straight away. First year can be about doing six different papers you like, then choosing what you want to follow. 

Science and the FHSS do manual degree auditing with students

They only see the students who know how to get help. How many people are there going round and round on the site? 

Craig - Engineering try to give all students an exit plan if they fail the courses required to proceed with a BE (and most have to convert to a BSc or information systems in a BCom)

Course chooser tool

Nicole – be careful that it doesn't become advice. Esp if the options can’t be followed.

General – degree examples: students are likely to just choose from the provided examples.

General – If the 'configuration' starts to be too complex (lot of options, exceptions, rules, variations etc.), 'contact a support/advisor' CTA could be shown.

Craig – need to tell school leavers that they need NCEA M or E for certain courses – A isn't enough.

Limit to first year.