Web Administration has been busy collaborating with a variety of groups around campus on a number of projects.

On-Line Course Evaluations:

A small, dedicated project team has worked since late February to fill a gap in the current course evaluation collection mechanism. Courses may currently be evaluated via paper if hosted locally or DCE’s XMS system fo distance projects. Web-based classes are in between these two options. This project began as a review of the four or five major evaluation systems already in use on campus. It was decided to begin with the system created by the College of Business as a base, extend that base to include additional university-wide concepts.

The On-Line Course Evaluation project involved contributions from CNS-OSG, Web Administration, College of Business, Career Resource Center, Office of Institutional Research and Planning, College of Education, Office of the Registrar, and College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. We successfully brought up the beta test and collected course evaluation data via the Web. For the end of spring term, the beta test included four professors, seven sections and was used by over 350 students. We are now planning to move the system to a stable beta configuration and evaluate options for moving to full production.

Calendar:

The calendar working group continues to make progress on identifying potential opportunities to improve calendar.ufl.edu as well as calendaring in general at the University of Florida. The working group has identified four potential candidate open-source applications to replace the current calendar platform. You can read more about the project at http://www.webadmin.ufl.edu/projects/calendar including the original strategy and charter documents. If you would like to participate in the evaluations or overall project, please subscribe to calendar-wg-l@lists.ufl.edu and send information about your availability and interests. The working group plans to create a recommendation by about July 15, 2007.

Web Administrators Meetings:

As part of our on-going collaborations with the UFCN-Web committee and University Relations, Web Administration helped to organize the web managers meeting in late March. We created the web managers survey to identify the skills, interests and suggestions from the University of Florida web managers community. Presenation topics included branding, survey results, the new version of the domain name policy, accessibility and search engine optimization. You can find the first two presentations at http://www.webadmin.ufl.edu/community/meetings/#past. Additional information on how to improve your web pages so that they are highly ranked by search engines is available at http://www.webadmin.ufl.edu/resources/tutorials/optimization.

One other note:

Mark Trammell's last day as University Web Administrator was May 11, 2007.

Mark worked for more than five years with the Web Administration group, over-seeing the UF Web presence. He was well known for his commitment to the possibilities and realities of the Web. He was responsible for many projects, including the redesign of news.ufl.edu and the extensive process that created the current UFL.EDU home page. With gratitude and appreciation for everything he contributed to UF, we wish him the all the best in his new endeavors.