AT FIRST, COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES WENT ABOUT IT all wrong. In the mid-1990s, special versions of the campus walking tour began appearing online. Featuring a map with arrows, they often followed the same route and offered a peak into the same buildings, explains Chris Carson, president of CampusTours. Panoramic images, with real estate industry roots, began appearing in these tours before long.
Then, around 2000, came a key realization: In person, sharing the school’s story through its facilities, with vignettes from tour guides peppered in, works well in providing prospectives with a sense of the campus. Online, not so much. In the virtual translation, “you got the facilities information but lost all the ambiance of the physical tour. What you were left with was buildings. Not many students are making decisions based on buildings,” says Carson, whose website has provided links to campus tours since 1997. Now the company sells software to help higher ed institutions manage their own virtual tours and has worked on about 450 tours directly.
Missing from virtual tours was the student experience. Through audio, video, and other effects, as well as features such as multiple tour guides and tours geared to specific audiences, the online campus tour is evolving to entertain and engage virtual visitors.
Virtual Tours to Take BRINGING A TASTE OF CAMPUS life into the homes of prospective students through a virtual tour takes time, resources, and creativity. Here are a few innovative features visitors can experience on several tours- most launched in the last year or two-worth checking out. (Schools offering a home page link to their tours are marked with a *.) Berklee College of Music (Mass.)* www.berklee.edu Watch a series of short videos, each with clickable bullet points leading to more information and footage, that cover the various experiences of applying to and attending the college, including what to expect on an audition, what internship opportunities exist, and how career services helps students. Bryant University (R.I.)* www.bryant.edu Click on one of many cue points, highlighted to the right of the video window, while watching 30 minutes of short vignettes to get more information on a topic mentioned in the video. Pick up bits of trivia through running captions beneath the video. Fitchburg State College (Mass.)* www.fsc.edu Meet at least 10 students and professors through a series of video interviews covering their first impressions of the school, the feel of campus, student/professor relationships, dorm life, and other issues. Browse 10 additional videos, each dedicated to a different aspect of college life, such as academics, student services, and arts and activities. Full Sail University (Fla.) www.fullsail.com View the three-sectioned virtual tour via map, menu, or slide mode, and see nearly every room on the high-tech campus, including various software labs, studios, boardrooms, and sound stages. Skateboard through campus in the map mode and stop at each landmark for additional information, or navigate through the buildings' interiors in menu and slide mode, traveling into different rooms through clickable photo trails, much like a computer game. Continued on Page 2
The Case for Tours with More
Most IHEs, however, have miles to go with their virtual tours, at least from Ron Reis’s vantage point. As co-founder and digital dean of YOUniversity, a new (and free) provider of campus video tours for invited institutions, Reis estimates that 90 percent of online campus tours are stuck in Web 1.0, with static text links, still photos, and no allocated resources. “Schools are proactive about teaching their students with the latest technology and about having the latest technology, [but] they’re not using that technology,” he says.
Reis sees the tour as “singlehandedly the most important element” of a college website. Research has shown that tour-related buttons get the most clicks, which is not surprising. “Those looking at college now were 13 when the iPod came out,” he says, adding that viewing streaming video is part of their everyday lives.
A bad tour is a barrier, says Carson. Students will “get frustrated very quickly if they can’t get the 10,000-foot view.” The web helps students narrow down potential schools to consider further, and frustration during an online visit leads to abrupt goodbyes.
Or, as a tip sheet on the CampusVT website puts it, “If they find your tour boring, what do they think of your school?” The company, which offers a tool for online tour development and maintenance, advises making visitors feel as if they’ve had an experience, not visited a website. Reis says the slow, monotone narrations in school-produced videos lose not just students but their parents, who are themselves of the MTV generation. Besides being fun, he believes virtual tours should show everything from the traditional tour—and more. One mistake, he says, is thinking, “We need to save a bullet for when they do make their official visit. We need something up our sleeve to show them then.” With many families finding traditional college visit road trips cost prohibitive, that chance may never come.
For Ohio State University, showing more meant interviewing the school’s “biggest fan” inside a full football stadium on game day. At the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the tour’s “more” is a virtual visit to a clean room holding the world’s largest laser. And for Western State College of Colorado, it’s showing the local flyfishing scene.
Alicia Dawson, lead photographer for eCampusTours, which has created 360-degree image tours for about 500 campuses, has shot a few cadavers in medical school labs. But in general, she says, students are hungry for views of where they would be eating, living, and taking classes.
“A great online tour is your chance to sell what is unique about your location, your architecture, your facilities, your campus, your student culture,” adds Adam Schroeder, co-founder of CampusVT.
