Higher Ed Failing to Use Popular Media to Reach Prospects

A blurb in the Campus Technology News Update recently discussed how academic institutions are not taking advantage of popular communication tools in recruiting. (View survey results from the study here.)

Sure, Web 2.0 tools such as Wikipedia and increasingly Second Life are seeing usage from academic institutions; however, those tools that 90 percent of college students already use daily are greatly underutilized. There are lots of possibilities…

  • A university MySpace site where alumni, current students, and prospective students can post comments and socialize.
  • A university MySpace group where these groups can post to discussion boards.
  • A university YouTube/Flickr group where students, faculty and staff can post videos/photos of events.
  • Allow students to contact recruiters via AIM/MSN/Yahoo and/or Skype.

It’s not too hard to think of ideas on how to utilize Web 2.0 in recruiting, and it doesn’t take much time in setting these up. Thoughts? Ideas? Is your campus taking advantage of these and other Web 2.0 tools?

One thought on “Higher Ed Failing to Use Popular Media to Reach Prospects

  1. I know some universities are starting to use Gmail for their email client. Gmail is specifically pushing their services as an alternative to higher priced Microsoft clients, etc. The last I checked, they weren’t integrating Google Docs into that package, but that would be an awesome deal if they did.

    We have some professors that use blogger and pbwiki in class. They were basically using their Blackboard forums more as a blog anyway, so the switch to a blog was natural. They then switched to pbwiki because they could password protect it. They still use it as a blog, basically. But that is only two classes out of hundreds that use that.

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