SEO: The Ultimate Guide for Higher Education

SEO is important, but often misunderstood, aspect of marketing. Everyone within the higher education space has probably heard the term before, but they may not know how to actually improve the SEO of their site. To that end, we’ve created the ultimate guide to SEO for higher education.

Is College for Everyone? Over Half of Students Say Yes

With all the headlines we’ve been seeing lately about the financial burden of college, and questions around admission practices, you may be inclined to think that people no longer view college as being worth it. But I’ve got an alternate headline for you: “Is College for Everyone? A Majority Say YES.” That’s the finding in a new, nationwide survey by BestColleges.com.The survey asked the question of people from age 16 to 65, who are currently pursuing college or planning to pursue college, and they found that the majority (56%) believe that college is for everyone,  regardless of their race, class, gender, or sexual orientation. Only 22% of people surveyed disagreed with that statement. Those are some impressive numbers!Now, that’s not to say that students view there being no barriers to college admissions. A survey by that same organization found that ⅓ of people are concerned that fees for applications and entrance exam fees will impact their ability to be accepted to college. But these new numbers are really incredible because they show that no matter how you slice the data, a majority of people in each demographic still view college as being for everyone.A majority of white students say college is for everyone; a majority of black, indigenous, and people of color students say college is for everyone; and a majority of LGBTQ+ students say college is for everyone. Yes, GenZ is slightly more skeptical of college than older generations, but even a majority of Gen Z respondents said that college is for everyone, regardless of what a person wants to accomplish in life. This is good news! More people attending college is good for society, no matter how you look at it. So don’t listen to the doomsayers out there, the data is clear, and the majority agree: college is for everyone!

How Enhanced Learning Spaces Can Improve Enrollment

I recently had the chance to speak with  Richard Holton about active learning and what to consider when approaching learning design for higher education. Richard is a writer and education consultant, as well as an Assistant Vice Provost for Learning Environments Emeritus at Stanford University. Previous to that he had a 30-year career as an educator and academic technology leader.    What follows is a summary and a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.   Watch the Conversation     Listen to the Conversation   Summary of the conversation Richard Holeton wrote a critically recognized hypertext novel 20 years ago. He is now engaged in planning and designing learning spaces. Holeton shares, 'My writing career, especially writing with new media, and my career in academia has been fortunately mutually reinforcing'.   The first computer classrooms, which some people will remember, were basically designed by technologists. The technology-enhanced classroom that we were lucky enough to design at Stanford with that grant from Apple was one of the first that was designed by teachers.   Holeton explains, 'I had a mentor at the preschool where I mainly taught who was all about learning spaces. She taught us, other teachers, to constantly redesign the room, divided into discreet spaces. Each space had to be defined, and in those days, we wrote each on an index card. I'm really fascinated by the idea that learning space in the physical environment took a while to be considered. Initially, learning spaces were designed by technologists, and only up until a certain point was the educators involved.’   So you have these learning spaces that actually can contribute to mutually enforcing the ability of a teacher to, transmit knowledge or, encourage learning. The LSRS is a rating system which means it has a series of credits. It's a tool for measuring the design of these classrooms to the degree to which they can facilitate multiple modalities of learning and teaching.   The LSRS has two seven sections in two basic parts and two main parts. Part A is focused on the global or macro level. Part B has four sections and it's about the stuff that goes into the spaces.   Holeton states 'Research that our stuff is based on, but there's research about designing online interactions and online spaces. Interaction design and so on is a whole field with its own set of research and expertise. We intersect with that. And importantly because all experiences are hybrid or blended, so you always have one foot in the physical.'   The LSRS is a self-rating system so far. It's not intended to be an all-inclusive framework applied to hybrid, online, and physical spaces. The tool is very useful in comparing your worst spaces with your better spaces.   The ratings for that section are going to be mostly the same for every classroom. They ask questions about your support and operations operation. Are you preparing faculty to teach in your spaces? What's the training like? Do you have an online module? One of the drivers for creating this was to simply call attention to the state of the learning spaces. You can compare yourself, you can do the play to get things done at Stanford, and you usually want to compare to the peer institutions.   The quality of any learning experience is mostly determined by the students and the instructors more so than by the physical environment. Research does show that aspects of the built environment can impact learning. 'You can't learn very well if you're hungry, thirsty, too hot too cold, and so on'.   We're getting, constantly, messages from the environment that impact our cognition. A lot of these messages are non-conscious, the air pressure the temperature, and so on. But they affect our behavior and they affect our cognition.   LSRS is all about what activities are enabled, right? Because we can't control what happens in the space that's controlled by the teaching. But we can enable things to happen by the design of the room. We wanna enable activities that research has shown are effective for learning.   The LSRS is a tool for those who want to enable learning and improve these spaces or design these ideal spaces from scratch. Holeton shares, ‘When we started in the early 2010s, we could see that a substantial community had evolved already around learning space design in higher ed. We wanted a tool that we could use to call attention to spaces that needed attention to try to get resources,' he says. 'And then I guess at the same time, putting a stake in the ground and saying here's a way to tried to measure things'.   LSRS is a shared language and a shared taxonomy for learning spaces. There is no direct competition between LSRS and WELL building standards. FlexSpace.org is a searchable database of learning spaces where anyone can upload photos and information.   LSRS is a set of tools that can be used to assess and improve learning environments. The tool is available for free download from the LSRS website. There are thousands of downloads of the tool.   Holeton continues, 'Learning spaces in general have improved over the last decade or two. It's an ongoing project to convert a vast legacy-built environment of classrooms that were built to support the pedagogy of a hundred years ago. If money were no object, everyone would rebuild and retool all their classrooms.'   Design thinking is applied to space in order to enhance the activity, in this case, the activity is teaching, learning, or the transfer of knowledge. So there's another emphasis right now with the DEI, or I think in higher education circles it's EDI, but equity, diversity, and inclusion.   Inclusion begins before you're designing the actual space. The main way that you create an inclusive learning environment is through teaching practice, through pedagogy. You can have a room that scores a thousand percent on the LSRS and there's no guarantee that inclusive teaching's gonna take place there.   The LSRS is designed to welcome learners with different physical abilities. Physical inclusion is about making sure everyone can have the same chance to have the same experience in this space, including access to all the affordances of the room. Cognitive inclusion is really about applying UDL, which is a Universal Design for Learning and applying that to the physical design of the space. The LSRS team has wrestled with this for years, actually. How do you quantify cultural inclusion? How can the physical environment help create a sense of belonging and make spaces welcoming and inviting to different people? And the way that we thought about it is in the sense of social identities.   A trend in modernist architecture has been to generally remove cultural markers and make spaces neutral or culture free. We should note that many of our campus spaces were designed historically in a context of exclusion, of excluding certain groups. Changing the language in the description of a STEM course to make it more gender-neutral or making it more of a visual representation of women can increase the enrollment of women.   The aim, as Holeton describes is that 'We hope that LSRS principles of the LSRS apply not just to classrooms but beyond. We know that most learning takes place outside the classroom, not inside the classroom. So in that sense, the general campus environment is even more important.'   Full Transcript Ian Evenstar: Tell us about yourself and how you went from writing a critically recognized hypertext novel 20 years ago, and now, where you find yourself engaged in planning and designing learning spaces. That's quite a trajectory. Tell us about that.

Higher Education Branding, Marketing, and Design Predictions for 2023

Top Stories in Higher Education from 2022

iHeart Media on media buying for Higher Ed

UNINCORPORATED recently announced a partnership with iHeart Media. I sat down to speak in more detail with Ryan Lieberman, a senior Vice President of Sales at iHeart Media, about what the collaboration will also us to do for higher education clients. Below you'll find a lightly-edited transcript of our conversation. You can also watch or listen to our conversation at the links below. Watch the conversation:   Listen to the conversation:

Media Buying for Higher Ed with UNINCORPORATED and iHeart Media

Big News: UNINCORPORATED has partnered with iHeart Media - In today's higher education market, it has become increasingly difficult to cut through the noise and reach the ideal prospective student. More schools are competing for a smaller pool of prospects, which can make marketing and advertising efforts more expensive while garnering less-than-ideal results. With so many organizations operating a "set it and forget it" strategy, it's no wonder they don't see results.That’s why UNINCORPORATED is excited to announce that we have partnered with iHeart Media to elevate our media buying capabilities, specifically for university and college programs. Through this partnership, we are able to reach audiences all across the nation with premium audio, video, and display content. You can also read or watch our discussion with iHeart about this partnership.

International Student Recruitment: Methods & Strategies

I recently had the chance to talk with Karla Reigosa, who is an Assistant Director of Undergraduate Admissions at Florida Southern College. We took a look at methods and strategies to build relationships and improve your international student recruitment efforts. Below you'll find an edited transcript of our conversation.

Growing Enrollment at Your University - A Conversation w/ Anushka Sapra

I recently spoke with Anushka Sapra, who is the Assistant Director of Admissions at the Office of Undergraduate Admissions at Northeastern University. Anushka is a higher education professional who works in admissions at one of the leading universities in the US. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Web accessibility to promote inclusivity at colleges & universities

For the 61 million U.S. adults living with a disability, going online can be a frustrating experience. It is filled with videos that cannot be heard, pictures that cannot be seen, and forms that cannot be completed. But it does not have to be this way. Today, there are tools and resources to empower people of all abilities to navigate the internet as well as contribute to it.