A question for Leaving cert students (2007-2009)

hunnymonster

I haven't been on the leaving cert threads before, The internet wasn't even a twinkle in anyone's eye when I sat it. Now however, I'm involved in third level education and one of the mini projects I'm working on at the moment is the content of the universities website. In particular, we need to change it so that perspective students (that's you guys) can easily identify the information you need about the course.

So if anyone has a few seconds to jot down some thoughts, I really would appreciate it.

I'm interested to know in what sources you use to find out about careers/further study?
what attracts you to particular courses (points, work placements, facilities.....)?
what websites do you enjoy going to (thinking of design here rather than content)?

Thanks for any feedback you can give me. I hope I can come up with some ideas on how to improve the public face of the course websites.

tolosenc

hunnymonster wrote:

I'm interested to know in what sources you use to find out about careers/further study?

Careers teacher, Qualifax.ie, and some FÁS thing...

hunnymonster wrote:

what attracts you to particular courses (points, work placements, facilities.....)?

Job ops, general interest in the field, good facilities at the particular college.

hunnymonster wrote:

what websites do you enjoy going to (thinking of design here rather than content)?

General layout? Some flash is your best bet. Not too bright and in your face, neutral/dark colours. And make it slick and professional looking. And easy to navigate...

AdMMM

Well I'm assuming that you aren't going to try anything groundbreaking, so I would recommend that you draw inspiration and ideas from existing colleges. After seeing the thread, I decided to look around the various HEI sites and seeing which colleges did a good job of explaining the available courses and facilities and which colleges didn't.

Waterford Institute of Technology
I have always hated the primitive design of the WIT website. It's gone through many "redesigns" in the last 7 or so years but I'm telling you, it's about as usable and useful now as it was back then! Firstly, there isn't enough (in my mind) information given regarding the available courses. There is only a short description of what the course is about and nothing is explained about you'll be study, it is just merely stated with no further information given. This is a prime example of how not to present your courses to prospective students!

DCU
I wasn't initially impressed either by the DCU site but they do offer an FAQ section (eg:here which answers the most commonly asked questions. By implementing an FAQ onto your site, you are ensuring that the students have all the information at their fingertips and also ensuring that college staff aren't being asked the same questions over and over again! What I also liked is that they provide much more information about modules being studied (but only for some courses it would seem).

UCC
I have always found the UCC site to be both pleasing on the eye, and full of information. There are informative overviews for every course and explanations of modules to be studied. Of all the sites I looked at during my research stage, UCC's impressed me the most!

I haven't got time to look at the other ones,but I'll do it when I get back tonight .

JC 2K3

obl wrote:

General layout? Some flash is your best bet. Not too bright and in your face, neutral/dark colours. And make it slick and professional looking. And easy to navigate...

Flash? God no. It's slow and annoying.

cocoa

JC 2K3 wrote:

Flash? God no. It's slow and annoying.

+1
flash kills a good site because it is never compatible with every browser and it generally gets in the way of a good navigation system.

I never really looked at very many of the sites but I've been all around the DCU site and tbh I can't really praise it very much. The navigation isn't great but you can at least get to the information you want once you have the hang of it (except in some special cases) but I've seen my fair share of server side errors on it so... On the other hand, there is a lot of information there and that's a definite pro.

tolosenc

cocoa wrote:

+1
flash kills a good site because it is never compatible with every browser and it generally gets in the way of a good navigation system.

I thought that too until recently. Some of the stuff out there is really top notch...

cocoa

obl wrote:

General layout? Some flash is your best bet. Not too bright and in your face, neutral/dark colours. And make it slick and professional looking. And easy to navigate...


I thought that too until recently. Some of the stuff out there is really top notch...

ok, let me re-iterate...

What in god's name can you do with flash that improves navigation that you can't do better and in a more compatible way with css and/or javascript (but hopefully not too much) ?

seriously, the only thing that flash really does well is moving parts but inherently adding moving parts means two things:

they will either get in the way of navigation (oh, let's have coloured balls floating across the screen all the time so the user must have FPS experience in order to navigate) or if you're lucky leave it fully accessible.

either way, why bother

moving parts is virtually impossible to get to work properly and smoothly on every browser in every OS with every screen resolution. the time spent getting this to work would just be too great.

umm... </rant>

Naikon

Flash...don't get me started:rolleyes:

Naikon

obl wrote:

I thought that too until recently. Some of the stuff out there is really top notch...

Most of the sites that use flash suck tbh.
The closed source development model and DRM aren't too appealing either.

SamHamilton

what websites do you enjoy going to (thinking of design here rather than content)?

TCD's is great. There's a great deal of information to be found on the homepage and a whole lot of links yet it doesn't seem cluttered. Plus, the colour scheme is consistent. The different sections vary only slightly in colour.
To see the opposite of this, check out the NUIG website. It seems cluttered and there's a huge range of colours which is annoying, it looks all over the place. Some sections are in white, others in red and then there are a few blocks of yellow, blue, green, you name it!

I'm interested to know in what sources you use to find out about careers/further study?

The "virtual career library" on NUIM's website is brilliant, the best source of career information I've found.

Nehpets

I have to say, I like TCD's. News links on the right hand side, a good and easy search up the top right (Google), easy to find courses, Prospectus in 2 clicks - www.tcd.ie

UCD's is better than it was. It used to be terrible. Nice search, although doesn't seem perfect. Nice "spotlight" section over in the right. - www.nuid.ie

Also, http://www.qualifax.ie/ is brilliant

eZe^

cocoa wrote:

(oh, let's have coloured balls floating across the screen all the time so the user must have FPS experience in order to navigate).

Ahahahahahahahahah!!!


I always found UCCs website to be quite crap tbh. Its difficult to find exactly what youre looking for, it can be quite cryptic...

hunnymonster

Thanks for all the feedback (or as we're supposed to say these days feedforward!)

I'm actually from a TCD background but I've just moved to UCC. There is plenty of information there but the linking is awful and not at all intuitive. I also find it a bit bland but bland and clear is infinately better than flashy and unreadable. College websites are huge beasts with hundreds of contributers. TCD have made a very concious and painstaking effort to ensure continuity accross the website. The checks needed have made grown men cry but it does make for a clean looking site.

I'm glad to see people are looking at job opportunities in choosing careers. I think I stuck a pin in the cao handbook:o Also glad you're looking into course content. There have been cases of name changes in course which have increased the points by 100 within a year even though the content didn't change at all. For example
Blah science and Health will be in a much higher demand than blah science even if the content is exactly the same.

tolosenc

Just to back up my point: Did you notice the attention spans of some of the people lin your cla.. Oooh! Shiny!

Gone West

UCC site is good? I think not...
Why use fancy divs etc when half my screen is wasted with a blank whiteness with no content?
Thats the first flaw, and tbh CBA reading any more because of it.

spurious

Remember many students will be accessing the sites from school computers (not everyone has a computer and the net at home), so do not design a site that needs high end computers to access its features.

Make sure it will be let through the school net nanny system, the name of which escapes me at the moment.

JSK 252

spurious wrote:

Make sure it will be let through the school net nanny system, the name of which escapes me at the moment.

That doesnt matter. Use a filter faker.

hunnymonster

Did/Do you look in detail at course content. Do any of the following attract you

graduate profiles
work expericence/placement
job statistics
opportunities for postgraduate study
topics that are familiar from the leaving cert course - for example are you more likely to go for something called vectors not linear algebra (similar courses could be named the same thing)
facilities - recreational and course specific



Thanks again for all the pointers. It's funny how quickly you get out of touch with being 18!

SamHamilton

Did/Do you look in detail at course content. Do any of the following attract you

graduate profiles

These are great in my opinion. Most, if not all, people will be unfamiliar with the subjects studied in the course so it's hard to tell whether you'll like the course or not. But when you read a past student's note about how much they enjoyed such and such an aspect of the course etc. it makes it easier to get a real feel for the course.

work expericence/placement

This would attract me but they never seem to be offered in the courses I'm interested in (Arts stuff) so...

job statistics

I'm sure these are great for some courses but they just depress me when I see that the majority of English/philosophy/psychology graduates are living on the streets with cardboardbox houses.;)

opportunities for postgraduate study

Yup. It makes it seem like your course will open up doors for you.

topics that are familiar from the leaving cert course - for example are you more likely to go for something called vectors not linear algebra (similar courses could be named the same thing)

Not necessarily. It's kind of exciting to read about new topics that you've never heard of and to ditch the Leaving Cert days.

facilities - recreational and course specific

Yup, we like the auld facilities we do. Especially when looking up about language courses.

gavo82

I am going into 1st year in st pats and i find their website terrible. Repeatedly i have tried to find out the date of my orientation and registration but to now avail. The anvigatioon on the website is poor!

www.spd.dcu.ie

In contrast i find dcu's website to be refreshing and much easier to navigate!!

Anyone share my opinion on pats site??

gavo82

I am going into 1st year in st pats and i find their website terrible. Repeatedly i have tried to find out the date of my orientation and registration but to now avail. The anvigatioon on the website is poor!

www.spd.dcu.ie

In contrast i find dcu's website to be refreshing and much easier to navigate!!

Anyone share my opinion on pats site??

Xhristy

This post has been deleted.

Naikon

http://www.dit.ie/DIT/Homepage/index.html

Trial_Version

SamHamilton wrote:

To see the opposite of this, check out the NUIG website. It seems cluttered and there's a huge range of colours which is annoying, it looks all over the place. Some sections are in white, others in red and then there are a few blocks of yellow, blue, green, you name it!

Have to disagree with this.
NUIG's website is probably one of the better ones out there. They have piles of info about the courses, grades, requirements, links, admin & getting started, college life, facilities... etc.
The students' union also run the Students' Information Network (www.sin.nuigalway.ie). This gives you a bit of insight into student life, whats happening, news, etc.