Jason’s Exodus

re: Earngey’s post. My head was pumping out a fair whack of response, so much that I decided to post it instead of leaving a massive comment.

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My big thing with websites was that they need to fulfil a purpose. This involves having a purpose, and then fulfilling it.

The current website is not much more than “we exist”. There’s a tonne of information, but not all of the information is all that useful (the calendar isn’t helpful beyond “this date has stuff on it”)

I think that the purpose of promoting Moore College is a valid one, but how they achieve this is what needs to be thought through and implemented. Here’s some random stuff off the top of my head:

1) Move the community part of the LSS forum somewhere else, extend it to include a guest section, link to this section for people wanting to ask questions about College, esp. if they are prospective students. It would provide interaction, and the answers would be genuine.

2) Audio library – I would echo your comments on that. I don’t think you’d open them all up at once, but you could go:
- select chapel sermons and series from some really good guys that dig way down into the archives
- more recent chapel sermons and series
- older Annual Moore College Lectures
Being chapel talks, they’d be less intimidating, probably have less IP issues, especially if they are older, and people would probably be likely to listen to these on their MP3 players.

3) Online content – I recall a lunch time conversation about this, and I think my thoughts remain valid. Not all the courses are easily transferable, but some are. Evening lecture material, and some first year material, especially ones which might be related to correspondence course material, would probably be easy to move across since these are not as mixed in with tutorial style stuff.

4) What sort of information do people look for?
Mark noted the video production. Another thing to ask is, what information are we conveying, and does that match up with what people are asking? Perhaps different videos that showed different aspects of the college experience would go well – eg. community life, the library, food!

5) Make technology work for you
I’m a noted non-band-wagon-er. I don’t advocate use of “the new hotness” for it’s own sake. I note that MPJ and DAH have a podcast, but the audio quality isn’t awesome. (Maybe someone ought to get them for half decent microphones?) The idea is good, but let’s make it work for us. Can we make iTunes work for us? It seems to work for some other institutions, but we would have to think about whether our purposes (there I go again) fit in with that.

There’s probably more I could say, but I’d probably just end up reiterating my fundamental point – purpose and purposeful implementation.

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