Techization

Touring college campuses can be painstaking and even sometimes boring.  I’ve been through my share of campus tours around the upper-midwest and have found some very interesting and others are down right boring.  I’ve often found that tour guides ‘go through the motions’ and say things like, ‘This is our commons area, we serve pizza and pasta and it is open till midnight.’  On the tour I’m likely to deduce that we’re in a commons type setting and the hours are likely posted on the door we came in and I’d assume they would be serving carb food like pizza and pasta!  There is no substance to tour guides that give you the very basics and sometimes bluntly obvious.  Now you can supplement your universities tour program with digital podcast tours while adding some consistency, engaging content and even a helpful training aid for campus tour-guides!

Getting the family together can be tough for some which can make scheduling a personal campus tour a real hassle.  By offering an audio podcast you can allow potential students and their families to tour the campus on their own time, even on weekends!  Not only do you give the freedom back to touring families, you also can control the presentation of the content within the tour and make it very consistent and engaging.  Ideally you would offer these mp3’s both on your university domain and on iTunes.  Why iTunes you ask?  Arguably iTunes is the most used platform to transfer digital media onto portable platforms, especially now with the iPhone.  Sorry Zune fans!  You can either create one large podcast and have listeners pause the mp3 while they walk to a new location, or splice up the tour into multiple audio files.  With the podcast tour you would offer a downloadable PDF with a map of your tour route.  A map and the directions you give in the podcast will be crucial to making it successful and easy to follow along. Many families will appreciate this offering from your university and it will increase your digital footprint, a key as we move further into this transforming digital world.

Podcast tours can also serve as a training mechanisms for your ‘in-person’ student tour-guides.  I have found great variability in campus tour-guides, not saying it’s a completely bad thing but using podcast’s to train will educate existing and new tour guides with little known information often found by researching your universities archives.  Fun facts that make you go, hummmmm, neat!  Information that is more engaging than, “Here is Johnson hall built in 1899, it has lots of math classes.”  That is the beauty of the podcast, you can re-do and re-do and tweak and perfect the tour until your completely satisfied with its presentation of your campus.

I have pitched this idea to administrators and media professors at the University of Wisconsin – Stout.  I hope there will be a ground swell acceptance for this new media idea.  One of the best parts about it is the investment cost is very low; quite important in this tough economic times.

Is your university doing something with digital media for campus tours?  I want to hear about it!  Comment below and tell me your thoughts and experiences.