This blog post is based on my presentation at the Georgetown Innovation Summit which begins at 2:53:00. 

To most people, hacking represents something negative. But I prefer to think of it as designing a workaround to achieve a desired result. By paying attention to these hacks, Higher Ed can gain all sorts of inisights to improve the overall student experience.

How Facebook learns from user hacking

In 2004, Facebook was growing, fast. Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the team needed to decide what feature to build next. They had to consider not only the time it would take to build the feature, but also the additional support costs.

One of the features being considered was the ability to upload photos besides your profile photo. Yes, there was actually a time when you could not upload your photo album to Facebook and tag all of your friends. It seems obvious to us now, however at the time it was not quite as clear that this was a feature that users wanted.

When the Facebook team looked at how people were using the site, they noticed users were changing their profile photo multiple times each day. Users wanted to show off their new photos and they came up with this 'hack' as a way to achieve their goal. 

In 2003 B.F. (before Facebook), students would receive the name, email and phone number of their assigned roommate and give them a call. It never occurred to them to look that person up online because there was nowhere to look.

By 2005 A.F., more than 85% of college students were on Facebook; each wanting to know everything they could about their new roommate to be sure that the next year of their life would not be spent in agony (desired result). The hack that students across the country constructed was to research their roommate on Facebook and if they did not like what they saw, call into the housing office and ask for a new roommate.

I have spoken with hundreds of people who work in on-campus housing and 99.9% of them experience some level of Facebook related roommate calls. The only department that did not experience them simply decided to withhold the names of assigned roommates until the students meet on the first day of classes.

So there is the hack. Now, how do you fix the process by incorporating the hack? Our clients achieve this through RoomSync because we empower students to search for roommates on Facebook. They are given access to all potential roommates before the assignments are made. The result? Users who want to be in control of the matching process are happy and housing departments do not receive any calls about Facebook.

How are students hacking your processes? Are they hacking their room like this Berkeley freshman? Try re-examining and thinking of ways to incorporate these hacks to improve the overall student experience. Do you have examples of hacks in Higher Ed? Leave a comment below!

Yesterday was a very interesting day for the Internet.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a U.S. House bill to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods. While the bill has good intentions, it poses a serious threat to emerging startups as well as established websites such as YouTube, Wikipedia and countless others.

To this end, a coordinated day of protest among websites occurred on January 18th, where each company took their own spin on how to let visitors know of the threats that SOPA presents. TechCrunch compiled a list of top onilne SOPA protests, which were particularly extensive and interesting.

While there were some memorable ones and also a few that were very effective in getting the point across, my favorite was done by The Oatmeal. Granted that the comic is a bit immature, you have to admit that it explains the risks that SOPA represents beautifully.

I believe that the best way to get through to most people about important issues is with humor. That is why I watch The Daily Show every day, because they deliver important news through the lens of comedy. It makes me more receptive and wanting to know what is going on in Iraq or what stance Ron Paul is taking on foreign policy.

What is the best SOPA protest website that you saw? Leave a comment below and let me know! 

We are starting a new series of blog posts featuring our fantastic clients to learn more about them and how they use RoomSync. Thanks to Sean Killion, Assistant Director for Assignments & Billing and Temple University Housing and Residential Life, for being our very first interviewee! 

How did you get involved working in higher education, and specifically, Temple Housing?

I went to Philadelphia University for business. I spent 6 years in advertising and marketing then went back to school for long-term career opportunities. I earned my MBA while working in Business Services in the Housing Department at LaSalle University. It was during this time that I switched from the business world to the higher education world. In March 2007, I left LaSalle for Temple University.

What unique things have you done in the past 5 years at Temple?

Residential Management Systems (RMS)

At Temple we had a homegrown system but in past three years, we moved from our IBM Mainframe, implemented an ERP system called Banner, and now use Residential Management Systems. Using the RMS StudentWeb Self-Assign, we can give students more flexibility in choices and inform them about the resources available to them earlier.

Roommates

Three or four years ago we were looking to satisfy our need to inform students about resources and technology for roommate selection. We have been with RoomSync for two years now thanks to their RMS partnership.

Housing on Demand

At Temple University, we’ve created “Housing-On-Demand,” a homegrown internal web application that gives students a user-friendly format to more easily communicate with the Residential Life Department. It consists of about 20 different apps including those specially tailored for students staying over breaks or moving onto campus early.

What does Temple University's Housing and Residential Life's social media presence look like now?

We use RoomSync to ease roommate selection and we have a Facebook fan page. We are mainly a resource for students to provide information about their interests on the fan page, however, in the coming fall semester we are planning to engage more people by running our Annual Room-Decorating Contest through Facebook.

How did you hear about RoomSync?

We were using RMS but were looking for more roommate-matching solutions. RMS recommended RoomSync because you specialize in this area. In addition, your application is integrated into Facebook so students didn’t need to go through a whole new system just for housing. 

What have you found to be the most efficient and effective way to inform students about RoomSync and get them to use the application?

We combine promotional mix strategies to get the word out about RoomSync and the entire housing selection process. We issue publications to provide concise information to students and communicate electronically through links on our Facebook fan page and emails. Specifically at Temple, we have direct marketing opportunities like our open house program where students signing up on campus receive tutorials on our systems.

Would you say there is a time commitment?

From my understanding, the set-up process was very easy with sharing interfaces and it basically manages itself. RoomSync makes my job a lot easier because the students have been given that opportunity to feel good about whom they are matched up with.

Before RoomSync, did you experience a lot of Facebook related calls from students/parents about their roommate assignements?

Yes, we saw The Facebook Effect*!

After the implementation of RoomSync, did you see a change in the number of Facebook-related calls?

RoomSync definitely drastically reduced the amount of calls and complaints. With RoomSync, we provide more information for our students to make them more informed consumers. It also helps to deflect complaint problems. If a student chooses not to use the resource, they should be ok with getting a random roommate.

What percentages of your students currently use or have used RoomSync within the past year?

We only upload our system with people who have made the commitment to live on campus with their housing deposit to target eligible potential roommates. Temple had 806 freshmen users this past year with a total of 25,183 visits (Approximately 31 visits per user to the application).

What shifts have you seen in time spent on and frequency of roommate conflict, room changes, and complaints, etc.?

Roommate conflicts due to random matching at Temple have definitely decreased with the increased use of RoomSync as an information tool.

On a different note, what is your favorite movie? 

I love so many, but if you're going to make me narrow them down, you should at least say favorite per genre! Star Wars, The New Hope”

What is your favorite musical artist? 

Again, so many on my iPod. But I'll go with the Beatles and Eric Clapton.

Additional Resources:

Sean Killion Biography

Temple University Residential Life Fan Page

*The Facebook Effect: Receiving a number of calls from randomly matched roommates dissatisfied after looking at their future Roommate’s Facebook profile 

I love my job for a lot of reasons. For one, our clients are some of the most knowledgeable and passionate people that I have met. They are thought leaders not only in housing but also in higher education.

One example is Amy Jorgensen, Marketing Coordinator at the University of Florida's Department of Housing & Residence Education. Amy does an incredible job with the department’s marketing, branding and social media efforts. You can connect with her on Twitter here. The UF Housing & Residence Education Facebook page experienced phenomenal growth over the past year. Likes increased by over 4,500 and there were nearly 390,000 Facebook page views in just the month of September in 2011. To put that in perspective, that’s almost double the page views their primary website page receives all year!

She recently presented her social media strategies and tactics at the ACUHO-I Business Operations conference in Orlando, FL entitled “Rock out your page – Make the most of your Facebook presence”. 

The presentation was named a "Best Of" at the conference and is full of useful social media statistics and powerful strategies to create an engaging Facebook fan page presence. My favorite statistic, courtesy of Dr. Rey Junco, is that students check Facebook an average of 5.75 times per day.

Check out all the statistics and insights from Amy at the ACUHO-I Online Library, which is full of some other fantastic presentations as well.

Our RoomSync development team has been hard at work developing new features. We've just rolled out 'auto-reminder emails' so that automatic reminders are sent out to users on selected days counting down to the close of your matching network. This is a great way to gently remind users to make their final roommate requests before their network closes.

The feature will allow you to select a maximum of 4 times at which these e-mails are sent out from RoomSync, including 10, 5, 3 and 1 day prior to the close of the matching network.

To modify your e-mail settings, simply login into the RoomSync administration website and click 'View/Modify Network Closing Reminder E-mails' under the Network Administration section.



What do you think of this feature? How can we improve this in the future? Leave a comment!

I sat in on an excellent session this week at #NASPAtech put on by Ed Cabellon of Bridgewater State University entitled "social media strategy and planning". The focus of the session was obvious from the title, but what was not obvious is how Ed would teach the session.  

Rather than doing the normal slides highlighting keys to social media strategizing, he took a collaborative approach. Ed engaged audience members by enlisting all of us to build a social media strategy for our joint institution. On every slide, he led a guided discussion where we had to think critically about the key components of our strategy. What were our goals? What should our social media voice be? Should we use ;) or just stick with basic smiley faces? All this discussion made for a more engaged audience and, ultimately, more learning by the attendees, including myself.

Another example of this approach to education is at the University of Florida, where I graduated with my Masters in Entrepreneurship. I had been circling around the idea of roommate matching software powered by Facebook for the past year and finally decided to start the business during the first semester of the MSE program. By having a company of my own, all of the classes made more sense and became infinitely more useful. I could template all of the entrepreneurial classes over how they could benefit RoomSync.  

The other thing that Ed's presentation made me think of was a website I found last night called codecademy which teaches people how to program. Why did I think of this? Try signing up for the site and you'll know. They make you code in order to register for an account! Genius.  

Too much of the education that I witness in K-12 and higher education is not taught like this. Instead, professors are asking students to regurgitate dates and equations. I hope to see a growing number of approaches to education like the ones above.

The RoomSync team is traveling to the EDUCAUSE annual conference in Philadelphia this week to participate in Startup Alley. The spirit of Startup Alley will be this: Shape the Future.  Startups are asked to sit at coffee tables and have conversations where their goal is to learn from potential customers – what their problems are, what the challenges are, and whether the new product and services offering are headed in the right direction, meeting a real need, or even outright desirable. We'll even have an opportunity to meet and discuss higher education with the CTO of the United States, Aneesh Chopra.

We whipped up a little video for the event where I discuss what our goals are for the conference and our key learning objectives.

Startup Alley is being organized by Michael Staton, CEO of Inigral, the makers of the Schools app on Facebook. You can read more about Startup Alley in Michael's blog post here.

If you'll be attending EDUCAUSE this week, be sure and stop by our booth to say hello! 

The web is brimming with all types of content, some good and some bad. In the RoomSync application, there is also a lot of content that users can access while searching for the perfect roommate at their university or off-campus apartment. We give users access to Facebook profiles and lifestyle preferences to help them make the roommate decision. As we were building the application, we received a lot of great feedback from our clients. What we heard is that they wanted to see an editable text area where users can write down what they are looking for in a roommate. This was a great idea and we decided to implement the “About Me” and “About My Roommate” tabs for this purpose.

With great power comes great responsibility. Now that we have given users the ability to enter whatever descriptive text they would like to, how do we make sure that they enter appropriate content? With thousands of users, it becomes difficult to monitor language through manually searching each RoomSync network. Enter Defensio!

Defensio is a new security suite for the Web, and it has the ability to integrate directly into Facebook applications like RoomSync. What Defensio does is allow the RoomSync application to block users from entering inappropriate and malicious content within these two sections, helping to keep the site clean of offensive language.

If a user is attempting to post content with a word that Defensio deems offensive, the user will be directed go back and edit their content because of the profanity. In a case where the content passes through, the user will be prompted with a message that their About Me section was updated successfully.

Let us know what you think about our integration with Defensio, comments are always welcome!