History & Purpose

Originally developed in 2014 from digital skills teaching materials, College Websites was launched in 2017 and is intended to populate the operational knowledge gap between digital practitioners and senior leaders which it does by providing original sectorwide research data and reporting.

The principal focus is on the website presentations of tertiary and adult education providers, with a slight deviation to review, to provide a 'root of the fruit' context, the higher education sector's marketing faculty presentations.

The initial purpose of reviewing corporate websites was to identify practices that were worth teaching and emulating. The first projects were reviews of basic technical operations and these then morphed into a process of identifying assessment metrics. ►

The more practical purpose of these reviews has been to identify and champion instances of best practice from within the tertiary and adult education sector. These examples of best practice have often been hidden outliers that can only ever be revealed through serendipitous luck or a process of methodically mapping the sector’s 440+ corporate websites.

The two dozen sectorwide reviews have covered general website operations and functions, specific service areas such as the Library Services, technical standards, visitor traffic, and compliance with regulations. All of these are straightforward to optimise but are also not sufficiently significant to concern senior leadership teams.

The inspiration to provide live dashboards for each of the UK's 440+ tertiary and adult education provider was by the then Head of Marketing at Havering College Tony Wittridge in 2016. The tracking of sectorwide site traffic using the now discontinued Alexa service went all the way back to training learners about marketing performance in 2015. Working closely with colleagues across Havering College, now part of New City College, especially Admissions, Apprenticeships, and Libraries, showed an absence of methodical research on the digital presentation of support services sectorwide.

Us

We are a small team of technical researchers based in central Hackney, with one part-time employee, Jed Keenan, and a small group of stringers. We have undertaken research projects in a wide range of sectors including local government, higher education, and international diplomacy, but the principal focus continues to be on the development of the tertiary and adult education sector.

Our purpose is to champion the pivotal role of the tertiary and adult education sector in digital skills training and its critical importance for every social, commercial, political and cultural enterprise.

Reports

Running like-for-like comparisons of all 440+ tertiary and adult education sector websites provides meaningful insights into the distribution curve of institutions' technical sophistication. These methodical reviews of all websites also reveals outliers of exceptional practice. Identifying extraordinary examples of managers of Library Services using digital systems in original and absolutely unique ways, or managers Digital Education Services designing and operating VLE in truly innovative and engaging ways, benefits the whole sector, its learners, and by extension, everybody.

Learning from these outliers and defining the metrics that can be codified to define minimum standards of operational and technical sophistication supports the effective line-management of the staff delegated with responsibility for undertaking these tasks. There is notably low status afforded to the public presentation of technical sophistication. This low priority can be understood within the context of an extended period of gross underfunding, but is a clear indicator, particularly to technically sophisticated students, of the technical sophistication of the education being provided.

Many of the legacy reports are out of date. Some, such as the annual financial reporting and profiles of Principals/CEOs are routinely updated, but others have been primary reviews (initial assessments) and have not been repeated because of the time that is required.

Feedback

The most frequent response by colleagues in the tertiary and adult education sector from right across the UK has been to ask for recommendations for contract developers and guidance on rebuilding their corporate websites. The reply is generally that website development is actually rather straightforward and full integration with an SIS, MIS, CRM, Mailer, HRMS, and the Google Analytics suite including Search Console and Looker Studio.

There has been two instances of people being unhappy about unflattering data, and one complaint over a perceived copyright infringement. So just to clarify, for this website to show content that is owned by tertiary and adult education providers, we rely on Section 30 of the 1988 Copyright, Designs & Patents Act. This is not to discourage any queries whatsoever, and any requests for edits are more than welcome.

Conclusions

There are both negative and positive summations from undertaking these longitudinal mapping exercises of corporate websites:

The negative is that quite often there is an absence among staff and senior leaders of an appreciation of technical sophistication and the role it plays in optimising student completion, attainment, and satisfaction. Thankfully this has been drastically addressed by the changed work patterns prompted by the Covid pandemic lockdown, but there is still a real and visibly obvious issue.

The positive is that, located nationwide and throughout the sector, there are teams of expert specialists that are achieving and maintaining a quantitively world class standard of work. They are presenting optimised SEO and accessibility, innovative Library management tools, and governors, senior leaders, faculty & support staff, and elected student reps that is better than any University.

This is hopefully an invaluable way of setting attainable project targets. It is also hopefully a practical and effective method that can be utilised as part of digital skills training curriculum and in enrichment workshops.