In addition to the main technology evaluation areas, we also briefly investigated these areas:
Career Pathways
Our student KJ sessions showed this content is important to prospective students, and validated the implementation of the widget. The widget itself is accessible, scalable, and straightforward to theme. We recommend you continue to roll this out to program pages beyond Online+.
Course Catalog
Modern Campus has a Widget API that allows you to connect to your catalog data and embed it elsewhere on your site. We recommend using this API to serve details about degree paths and key courses directly from the catalog on pages where it’s strategically advantageous to do so. Objective: avoid repetition, outdated content, and reduce editor workload.
Some third party tools and subscriptions in use across TTU sites may be redundant or unnecessary. We recommend evaluating third party apps and tools in use across all sites in a "Rocket Money" style audit. This may help us identify redundancies and consolidate where possible. The savings on subscriptions and implementation time could be used to invest in strategic areas like search analytics.
Newly admitted students are overwhelmed by the many sign ups and portals involved in the onboarding process. While this is not technically "the website," it's part of their experience and they don't differentiate it. We recommend a deeper audit into these tools to see if this can be streamlined, or if there's a better way to guide students through the process.
We recommend a move to cloud hosting from on-site servers.Continue to explore Modern Campus hosting. A separate enterprise hosting vendor is a good idea if you want to host non-Modern Campus sites. If so, we recommend Digital Ocean, Cloudflare, or Azure. We have not evaluated these vendors with a TTU-specific rubric like CMS and search, but this is an option for future research.
