Widgets are drag and drop tools that make it easy to include useful content on the site without having to create it yourself. There are many options to choose from and can be personalized to your desire. In our sites we used calendars, slideshows, and social media feeds to make our sites more interactive. It was nice not having to add content constantly, as it was simple to add widgets and let OpenScholar do the work of generating our site. For example, adding one event on the News & Events...
OpenScholar recently reached out to 10,000 faculty and administrative leaders at over 1,500 U.S. universities and colleges to conduct a survey to understand how colleges and universities leverage their department and faculty publications, research and academic achievements. We specifically targeted and solicited feedback from Deans, Department Chairs and Program Directors from a wide range of disciplines. I wanted to share the highlights of the survey with you and also give you an opportunity to see how you stack up. More details on that are at the end of this blog post.
The results were surprising and informative and showed that while almost all who surveyed acknowledged the importance of leveraging this type of critical information as a driver to meet key institutional metrics, a great opportunity exists for many higher institutions to highlight their departmental and individual achievements in a more successful manner. More than half of the respondents in our survey felt they were not effectively promoting their departmental research and other achievements and less than 20% were happy with how individual achievements are promoted. That provides a lot of room for improvement -but why does marketing your milestones matter?
What Was Important
In the survey the metrics impacted by effectively marketing departmental and individual achievements included:
