New Features: Programs and Profiles

May 25, 2012

Dear CHSSWeb users,

We are pleased to announce the rollout of new features for the college academic program pages.

  1. New navigation. A set of top tabs for each program page: Overview (new), Degree Requirements (as is), Meet a Student (new), Meet an Alum (new), and Apply Now (new). Meet a Student and Meet an Alum only appear if there is at least one student or alum profile for the program in the CHSSWeb2 system. The Overview only appears if the program has overview text.
  2. Overview. For undergraduate programs, we've added an overview page for each degree program using the text from your information sheet, if there was one. The overview is intended to be the first view of the degree for prospective students. It is supposed to be more welcoming and promotional than the (often daunting) list of requirements. The promotional overview has sections on opportunities, careers, and "Why Mason?"  
  3. Student and alumni profiles. There is now the ability to show profiles of outstanding students and alums.  The college has written profiles for all UNDERGRADUATE students that won the Dean's Challenge Scholarship for 2010-2011 and for 2011-2012, so many of you already have profiles in the system. there are also profiles for some students and alums that were the topic of news stories. We plan to add profiles for students that won the Freshman Academic Achievement Award.

As before, the program elements that are in the catalog are managed by Dean's office staff as are the application requirements and deadlines, which change only once each year. Everything else can be changed by the editors of the program's site. To get started, for undergraduate programs we have added content to all the above new features using the information that is on the information sheets for your program. In cases where there are no info sheets, we added some generic content.

There is written documentation for editing these new features. CHSSWeb will also be holding training sessions.

We know these pages are text-heavy. We are tweaking the design and will be adding images soon. We are also in the process of getting images for the profiles and will add them as they come in. If you have photos of any of these students, please let us know. 

As you may know, there were student profiles for most programs a few years ago, but since so many of these were out of date, we moved them to "draft" status so they do not show up on the website.  Someone from the program needs to review and update or delete them. Almost all of these students are now alumns, for instance, and the profiles should be recast as alum profiles with the graduation date updated.

Here are some examples of the new overview pages: 

Graduate

Undergraduate

We hope you like these new features as well as the ability to edit them. We've met our goal of getting these done by the end of spring semester, before summer orientations. As always, we welcome your feedback at chssweb@gmu.edu.