Website improvements

R21. Enhance EOAS website content for QES recruiting

This section is about public facing content, not information for current students. Student advising, career preparation, program requirements, etc. should be provided on a platform that is easy to adjust annually. A Canvas-based advising resource would serve that need; see the students support page for this and other related recommendations.

Web content can be prepared for delivery at the EOAS website, but posting and maintenance requires computing staff or web-team support. Content might more sustainably be prepared as an EOAS blog post on one of UBC’s blogging platforms. Maintenance can be assigned to anyone with a CWL and the WordPress platform is flexible, easy to learn, and permanent at UBC. For example, the PME website is hosted this way.

  1. Each web-content suggestion is not “difficult” but needs to be on an active task-list for the website and communications teams.
    • Oversight (communications director?) is needed to approve and check off items from the list.
    • Content creation is an ideal activity (if well supervised) for volunteer or paid students with the communications and website teams.
  2. Existing and new web content about students needs to be re-purposed to inspire rather than simply to inform.
    • In other words, with a bit of creativity – and this shift in perspective or goals – content for and about undergraduates could be reconfigured to be more appealing to prospective students.
    • This means re-thinking the Undergraduate segment of the website, especially these three sections: “Why EOAS?“, “Student Achievements” and “Student Life and Events“.
    • Adjusting content from “present the information” to “inspire and make the viewer wish they were here” does not come easily for most scientists because their communication skills were developed to convey information in efficient, didactic, “presentation” styles.
    • Therefore, consider hiring a student from a marketing program or someone with advertising experience. Perhaps consult with UBC’s media relations team.
  3. Reintroduce information about EOAS courses. With no details other than the necessarily curt calendar descriptions, students can neither recognize the relevance and interest of these courses not anticipate what they are “in for”.

    Background, recommendations & discussion.

    • Background: The new EOAS website (to go live early Fall 2023) will no longer have details about every EOAS course. This decision was based on the difficulty of convincing instructors to take responsibility for keeping these pages up to date. Service courses will have attractive descriptions, but the course details database will no longer exist. However, dropping this opportunity for visibility because instructors won't keep content current is the wrong action. Instead of dropping, an alternative means of building and maintaining needs to be developed that does not rely on instructors.
    • Recommendation: reintroduce course description information on the EOAS website to help students set expectations and characterize the course's place within degree program curricula. A very simple course description template is needed, perhaps just one description-editing field and one attractive or relevant image. Course Learning Objectives should ideally be included but consistency would be needed for all EOAS courses. (Perhaps requiring these for website use would in fact encourage them to be generated.) UBC information can either be pulled from the Calendar or simply point to the calendar (which uses permanent URLs).
    • Discussion: If the course details database is simplified, it should not be too much to ask for annual revisions of this information. It could be as simple as current instructor and course's learning outcomes (CLOs). Surely faculty could be expected to carry out a quick review and update, perhaps in May prior to students registering for courses in the upcoming year? In fact (and ideally) EOAS course webpages could become complete & consistent syllabi for each course, adhering to the minimum UBC-wide recommendations.
  4. Make scholarships & awards from outside UBC more visible
    • Augment the scholarships page to summarize opportunities beyond UBC.
    • Existing students need to be able to find this in the Canvas advising resource, but prospective students need to see there is financial support they can apply for.
    • Example: the handout with Opportunities for geophysicists (fall 2022) was provided to geophysics students in fall 2022, but an augmented version is needed including opportunities for ocgy, atsc and perhaps envr.
  5. Build a showcase page  about courses involving physics & computing like the one for climate related courses. Leverage lists at the courses-by-topic page.
    • QES program “navigator” information could also be made available as a brochure.
    • Other programs could benefit from navigator pages once there is an effective template.
  6. In the EOAS website’s “Degrees” section add a Combined Options section at the same level as the seven specializations now visible. Include https://science.ubc.ca/students/programs/integrated-sciences, Double major, Minor in … , Honours, Majors, Combined Honours.
  7. Augment and modernize the QES & geoscience careers and opportunities page. The existing “Career Paths” page is great, but it could emphasize the diversity, importance and rewards of career options (traditional and otherwise) available to students with QES degrees.

    QES showcase details.

    • Where to put (or point to) this content? (a) On the "Why EOAS" page - but maybe rename this as "Why study Earth sciences in EOAS" (b) On the "Career Paths" page, perhaps with sub-pages if needed.
    • Content should be relevant for several years to come.
    • It is more important to be attractive and inspiring than "complete". No one (least of all students) will read long segments of text.
    • Public are more interested in people (individuals) and "how it affects me" stories rather than "pure" science or engineering.
    • Prospective students are also more interested in "me", "people" and "altruism" than field work or discipline-specific details. Parents and most students are also keenly interested in the potential of a career for wealth & stability.
      • Reasons altruism is more important to students than other factors are discussed in Carter et.al., 2021.
      • Examples of how quantitative Earth science serves humanity can be found in "Mapping geophysics to the UN sustainable development goals", Capello et al., 2021.
    • Pointers to third party content: Focus on "Impacts", "Opportunities" and "Rewards". Highlight the variety of professionals, especially EOAS graduates.
    • Consider alternate forms for delivering content that was prepared for the web. Maybe  flyers, downloadable PDFs, handouts, use during lessons, labs or assignments, & others
    • From BC & Canadian geophysical (BCGS, CSEG, KEGS, and others) community, ask / learn about careers for greening economies, scholarships, internships, showcase occupations.
    • Gain inspiration for content from physics, math, computing Department career description pages, for example, UBC's PHAS page.
  8. Improve the FoS page “What can I do with a BSc in Geophysics?”. That page is OK but does not answer the title’s question. Instead, it answers – “what is the intellectual scope of geophysics researchers?”. Career options are listed generally, not in terms of contributions to society.
    • EOAS needs a similar page but one focused on how people with degrees in geophysics, atmospheric science or oceanography are contributing to society. It needs to refer to alumni and others.
  9. The alumni “showcase” page needs modernizing and maintaining regularly. It would not be onerous to add one or two entries each year, especially if there was an efficient repeatable procedure. See recommendations involving alumni elsewhere.