mobile

College mobile strategies are falling short


It’s not so much that colleges and universities included in a recent survey had under-funded mobile technology initiatives. Many didn’t have a mobile presence at all.

college-mobile-strategiesWhile many schools have had mobile websites since the late-2000s, more than 70 percent of Pennsylvania and New Jersey colleges surveyed by brand marketing firm Princeton Partners did not have a mobile presence, while half of the campuses surveyed that had a mobile presence showed major deficiencies.

The problems with shortcomings in a college’s mobile website is obvious to anyone familiar with the way students use smart phones and tablets.

About six in 10 students surveyed in the Princeton Partners report said they were “unlikely to ever return to a website if they had trouble viewing it on their mobile device.”

That could spell trouble for any school hoping to woo prospective students with an updated technology presence.

How colleges can drive more traffic to their websites

Jeanne Oswald, former executive director of the New Jersey Commission on Higher Education who serves as an industry advisor to Princeton Partners, said the well-documented spike in the use of mobile devices as a primary web-surfing tool caught many schools off guard.

“The rapid increase in use of mobile devices has left many schools ill-equipped to address the needs of what marketers now call ‘constantly connected consumers,'” Oswald said.

Among the shortcomings of the college mobile sites examined in the survey was a failure to “acknowledge the significant differences in how mobile users consume and share information.”

Some PC-based college websites, in fact, were directly replicated in full to the mobile platform — a strategy campus technologists have warned against for years.

Prospective college students might not browse a school’s website exclusively on their smart phones, but that’s often where the browsing starts, making the site’s mobile friendliness paramount in higher education’s tug-of-war for new students.

Responsive web design (RWD) has proven a hot topic in educational technology circles over the past few years, and a study conducted by Google, “The New Multi-screen World: Understanding Cross-Platform Consumer Behavior,” offers good news for colleges that have invested in RWD, which makes a school’s site readable on an enormous desktop screen or a shrunken smart-phone display.

Nine in 10 respondents to Google’s survey-based research said they moved from one screen to another to accomplish a goal—from smart phones to PCs, for example, or tablet computers to PCs.

The prominence of what Google termed “sequential screening”—going from one screen to another to view a school admissions site, say—grabbed campus technology leaders’ attention this month as the best reason yet for schools to prioritize RWD as a way of attracting prospective students.

“What the Google study shows is that the admissions game is probably not moving exclusively to mobile, but that your mobile site is becoming the first thing prospective students look at,” Karine Joly, a web marketing professional and founder of collegewebeditor.com, a site at the forefront of the RWD movement, said in a blog post.People move to different devices because they want to accomplish different things, and they prefer to use the device that better fits the specific need they’re trying to fulfill at a given moment.”

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