Are faculty web pages dead?

[John Strubel]

Using a random, unscientific approach, I selected 10 higher education web sites and went hunting for faculty web pages.

What did I find? Not much.

Eight of the 10 universities do not have faculty web pages because either they abandoned the traditional faculty web concept or have replaced them with blogs and faculty profiles. Even the two universities that did have faculty web pages, the number of faculty members using the service was limited.

Drilling down deeper, it’s obvious why … how many faculty web pages have you seen that are unique? None. They are glorified resumes.

It led me to these conclusions:

1.) Faculty do not have the time or interest in adding or maintaining a web page. This seems unlikely to me. Most faculty web pages are static and the content almost always stays the same, so updates/maintenance is minimal.

2.) Universities have adopted more meaningful ways to incorporate faculty into their web presence (blogs, profiles, etc.)

3.) Are faculty web pages dead? I believe so.

I’ve have almost purged our system of faculty profiles. I have a few hangers-on, but I wearing them down …

We have experimented and failed miserably with faculty blogging. I do not have concrete evidence to back my theory up, but my explanation(s) for its downfall are:

a.) Blogging successfully takes a certain style. Take a moment and visit a few of the blogs you have bookmarked, what makes them successful? They have a unique ”voice,” a style that triggers an emotional response.

b.) Identify your audience. Blogging to fill up space is not blogging, it’s a waste of time and server space. If you’re a blogger, know your audience and communication (on their level and language) are important to relationship building blocks for bloggers.

c.) (In)consistency. Not enough time, vacation, you name it, posts were infrequent and inconsistent. Successful bloggers post daily, maybe once a day, maybe five times a day, but it’s daily and its consistent. There is a “frequency rhythm” to blogging that your audience depends on.

An idea we (Charleston Southern University) is getting ready to launch this Spring is the faculty profile, which is being used effectively at Notre Dame, the University of Southern California and a host of others (not part of my random list of sites, by the way).

It’s not a new idea, but it’s a great marketing tool for the university. It lifts up the academic profile, gives faculty personality and character and helps market unique programs and departments.

How is your university using the web to promote its academic programs and faculty? I hope you will join the conversation and share your success stories (and failures) …http://edudesigners.com/?p=49

[Michael Fienen]

Try telling that to folks around here. Whether used or not, it's a no-man's land as far as things go. In fact, it's a point of large concern with respect to our current redesign project. There is a substantial sense of entitlement to having web space, even if it isn't used, and regulating what it is used for brings on a lot of unneeded pain.

I think the problem arises when it is offered, and then withdrawn. Since the early days, it's been available for faculty. If it had never been available, it wouldn't be an issue more than likely, because it wouldn't be missed. I would be interested to know if the sites you reviewed offered it at some point in the past but took it away, or if maybe it's just a case where it isn't advertised. Ours is the latter. It's there, but you'll never find the faculty pages by reviewing our site.

[Kevin deLeon]

No...but what a NICE thought... ;)

[David Hamilton]

To solve some of the issues you've brought up, we moved to automatic generation of faculty 'pages.' Every faculty member gets one at the moment they first teach a course, and by default it contains their contact information and links to the courses they're teaching. They have the ability to add content to them as they see fit, link over to their ~ or externally hosted personal web content if they like, but by default every faculty member has one. Some departments have added substantially to these default pages, as have some faculty members on an individual basis, but more than half of them just ignore them. From the college's perspective we want these pages as a sort of public facing minimal CV for our faculty so that our prospective students know who's teaching here and what they're teaching. We also did this to overcome the previous inconsistencies, where some departments had a wealth of information about their faculty and others had none.

So far it's working fairly well. The Dean of Faculty's office reaches out to the faculty on an individual basis to offer assistance getting richer information up onto these pages, and our hope is that over a couple of years we'll have managed to really flesh out this material. We're also hiring casual labor to do periodic assessment and refresh on these materials.

[Michelle Cryan]

I was just thinking about this very topic on the way to work this morning. One thought about why they don't have pages was that content that would be useful on a faculty page, syllabus, course information, etc. is already available online through the course catalog, course management system, code of conduct, iTunesU and so on. So, the only thing left for a faculty page is the "glorified resume" page.

Coming from a K-12 institution before this, I found this methodology foreign. Department pages a certainly more predominate on campus than individual pages. I devoted a lot of my time at my last job to developing teacher pages and helping teachers maintain them. Maybe because I'm still relatively new to the campus, I want to find out more about the professors - even if it means only being able to read a resume. Heck, I'd be happy with a photo.

I guess personally, I find it sad that professors don't have personal pages, not just because I want to get to know them better, but think that students would agree. And it might give them a resource other than ratemyprofessors.com to aid in their decision to on whether to take a certain class.

[Kareem]

We have faculty listings on department pages. Contact info, background info, research interests, resume, etc.

We also have a separate server where faculty can get web space. CS has their own stuff which they use, but there are a surprising amount of faculty that manage to setup websites for a syllabus, homework schedule, etc.

[Aaron Rester]

At the U. of Chicago Law School (http://www.law.uchicago.edu), we have pages for each faculty member that are essentially an electronic CV, including publications. I currently add these by hand but am pushing for a database to increase searchability. But some of these faculty write a LOT, so the data entry alone would be extremely time-consuming. These pages tend to get a pretty good amount of search traffic, since many of our faculty are pretty well known.

A big promotional vehicle for us is our Faculty Blog (http://uchicagolaw.typepad.com) which has varying levels of participation (depending on time of year, etc.). This works pretty well, since blogging is huge in the legal profession in general. I also use the blog to post items about our faculty (links to research papers on SSRN, for example) that they sometimes feel embarassed to post themselves.

[Anthony]

I'm a little confused. Just under #3 you say that you "have almost purged our system of faculty profiles" and then further down say that you are about to launch faculty profiles.

[Nourisha]

we are a medical school but our faculty use their profiles to allow outsiders to connect with them. they are not fabulous profiles but they do provide a glimpse into the faculty member's private life. and they include updated CVs for those who care about that sort of thing. again, it's nothing special but our faculty seem to refer students and peers to their pages quite a bit.

[Edward Terry]

Faculty webpages are still being used at my institution. It's true , often they are little more than online resumes for instructors with the only content changing is the syllabus for which ever class they are teaching. The issue that i have for them is that they are not set to a subdomain, say faculty.domain.edu or something in which sets them apart from the regular website. Faculty websites are often poorly designed because the user rejects the schools web templates or some other reason. The only way to get to a faculty webpage on our website is from the online course schedule or the google search. There is no comprehensive list.