The new class of university freshmen will begin moving into dorms and onto campuses in the coming weeks marking an annual tradition of teenagers beginning their lives as independent young adults. But before parents and students made the final decision about what college to attend, they spent the summer visiting schools. And before they began visiting schools, many of them took virtual campus tours of these schools.
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Preparing for college is an exciting time for young people, but it can also feel a little overwhelming. With so many colleges and universities to choose from, it can be a challenge to know where to begin. Even after a prospective student has narrowed the list down to a few top choices, figuring out how to physically visit the campuses is difficult, especially if it involves expensive travel. Some colleges offer virtual tours online and that can be very helpful, but many of these are limited in scope, somewhat sterile, and a little too “pitchy” in their efforts to recruit prospective students. The best virtual tours are those that use student video, with real students serving as peer-to-peer tour guides. These presentations are much more authentic and more interesting.
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One of the biggest decisions that any family faces is where their kids go to college. Is it in an urban area or suburban area, what are the dorms like, how much does it cost and is it a place where they can envision spending a significant portion of their life?
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College is the doorway students enter when they exit high school. Like any unknown doorway, it can lead to strange, fascinating, and surprising places. Often times though, the challenge isn’t getting students to walk through that door, it’s getting them to stay in it.
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Earlier this year Hobsons came out with its annual report on undergraduate student recruitment. Similar to the results we reported earlier this year from Noel-Levitz, this report also stresses the value of the campus visit and the online virtual tour. What is really interesting in Hobsons’ data is that both the campus visit and virtual tour provide value in the search, applying and final decision process. This essentially covers all the levels of the recruitment funnel.
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Last week St. Mike launched an interactive campus tour in a slightly different format. St. Mike launched their tour completely through YouTube. The creator of the tour, Mallory Wood, was recently interviewed by collegewebeditor. What is really interesting from the post is Mallory’s insistence on crediting Seth Odell with the idea on his blog almost a year ago.
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Last week Noel-Levitz released their 2010 edition on the E-Expectations Report about what college-bound students are looking for in terms of online engagement during the admissions process. To create their report they surveyed more than 1,000 high school students about their online behavior and expectations. I’m not going to rehash the complete report here, but if you are looking for that, Karlyn over at .eduGuru wrote a nice summary or simply go download the report for yourself. What I would like to do is present a few very interesting data points and discuss exactly how we address those points.
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One of the first things we realized when starting nuCloud is that our map tools can be used for so much more than just campus maps. Any sort of virtual tour that can be accomplished through a map is a possible use of the software. Because we have a strong background in higher education it makes sense for us to start with that market, but it is by no means the only viable solution. Part of demonstrating these different uses is giving examples. By clicking on the image below you can see an example of our mapping tool used to explore historic Fenway Park in Boston, MA.
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Leave it to a major player like Cisco Systems to investment in showing off their newest data center through a flashy interactive map. Cisco recently spent $80 million in the renovation of an unused office building on its campus in Richardson, Texas. What better way to fully display this achievement than through an interactive map?
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When I look at different interactive maps and virtual tours around the web, more often than not there is a very distinct difference between the two. After all, a map is a map and a tour sometimes includes a map, but I’ve noticed that people commonly call anything a virtual tour including the following:
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