Postgraduate students have two distinct drivers behind why study, potentially serving as two needs that must be met by the website:
- Intellectual advancement or knowledge acquisition: The academic ideals behind university study certainly applies to some students, although to a (decreasing) minority. These people have less need for the website of liaison services, as they are mostly well connected relationally with school staff, have high domain knowledge and are usually moving straight through from studying at an UG level.
- Career aspiration: Either the next step of the general pathway is the primary driver for an increasing number (and proportion) of our postgraduate, even up to PhD level. These people will often pick up PG study after a number of years in the work force, sometimes soon after changing country, and sometimes after time off (e.g. raising a family). They often seek help, but can be quite focused on what they need out of study. Some know the exact programme, others have a time of financial limit to work within.
In both cases they have to make trade-off's between the PG programme options "apparently" (meaning that after a little reading some options are usually unsuitable) available to them. Initial thoughts are that while the taxonomy would work well for navigation the topic pages are unlikely to meet the information needs very often. Marketing information plus an "online shopping compare tool" would be more useful. We have already explored the notion of a "way finding" page between the topic/subject and a specific programme, like VI does currently.