Next week I’ll be heading to the OmniUpdate User Conference to give a presentation on a project we implemented on our campus a couple of years ago called the “My First Year” tab. The official presentation title is, “Using OU Campus in a Luminis Portal.” The “My First Year” project was mentioned in a Campus Technology article last year, and I published an article in NACAS College Services magazine (PDF) about it.
Based on student opinion survey feedback, the Division of Student Affairs at SUNY New Paltz determined they needed to make more outreach efforts to better communicate the services their division offers. A group of them came to me outlining their goals, and at the same time I was looking into other ways we could better utilize our new portal, Luminis, by SunGard Higher Education. The two ideas merged together, and we found a way to better communicate student affairs services to first year students. We’re now at the end of the second year of this project and evaluating what we’ll do with next year’s cohort. I’ll talk briefly about that at this conference, and will be blogging about it here as part of the on-going Café New Paltz series.
I’ve been a very happy OmniUpdate customer just over four years, using their OU Campus CMS product on our campus. An added bonus of going to this conference - they’re going to be filming me for their “Web site Hero” video series.
Mark Greenfield from the University of Buffalo will be the opening keynote speaker (@markgr on Twitter). We’ve started the hash tag #ouusers for tracking conference chatter through Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, etc.
Are you going to the conference? I’d love to meet you. Let me know in the comments, and be sure we’re connected on Twitter (@rachelreuben) if you’re there too.
Nice to know about this conference. I think educational institutes should conduct such events and conferences on regular basis, by keeping in mind the business demands and students needs for enrichment.