Prospective+students+and+web+2.0

=Using emerging technologies to engage high school students= Kirsten Abe, Shelley Giles, Claudia Swensen Prospective Students Office, Admissions, Student Services

The UWA Prospective Students Office aims to promote tertiary study generally, and UWA specifically, to secondary school students throughout Western Australia.

The majority of our work is completed through: • metropolitan school visits • regional trips • parent evenings • attending major and minor career expos • campus tours and events • individual counselling

We aim to be an approachable and useful service for all prospective students. Our goal is to help improve the accessibility of tertiary study to people by providing comprehensive information and advice about courses and admissions. We give advice in areas such as high school subject selections, alternative entry pathways, UWA student services, accommodation and scholarships.

Recently we have been working on ways to use technology to assist us in the provision of this information. We have incorporated a short video of this year’s Orientation Day into our PowerPoint presentations to give high school students an idea of the social, fun side of uni. This video consistently gets a great response from the from the students as it adds a bit of entertainment, provides a break from listening to us speak and demonstrates this aspect of uni much more effectively than if we just talk about it. High school students from regional areas or disadvantaged backgrounds often have less opportunities to visit UWA, so this video has helped us to give them a small experience of uni life and to show them that uni is not just boring study, and UWA is not all old fashioned and snobby!

In the future, we plan to make further use of technology to help us overcome some of the limitations to the services that we are able to provide to schools in regional and low socio-economic areas. For example, it is relatively easy for us to bring a current UWA student with us on some of our school activities. These students are generally really well received- especially if they attended that high school- as the school students can identify with the UWA student ‘who used to be one of them’. However, locating current UWA students who are willing and able to join us on school visits can be challenging, especially if they are from a school that sends very few students to UWA. For country schools, visits from current UWA students are usually not feasible at all. Since these are the kinds of schools where a positive role model would be the most valuable, our aim is to develop short videos of uni role models as a substitute for the real thing. We also intend to look into using vokis – animated characters to be used with voice recordings.

The most significant challenge that we face in this endeavour is finding the necessary time to make it happen. With only a few staff members in the PSO, just keeping up with our ongoing responsibilities is challenging enough and so unfortunately progress on new projects tends to be painstakingly slow.

Ms Kirsten Abe Prospective Student Adviser Prospective Students Office Phone 6488 7311 Fax 6488 1226 MBDP M353 Email kirsten.abe@uwa.edu.au

Mrs Shelley Giles Prospective Student Adviser Prospective Students Office Phone 6488 4631 Fax 6488 1226 MBDP M353 Email shelley.giles@uwa.edu.au

Miss Claudia Swensen Prospective Student Adviser Prospective Students Office Phone 6488 7311 MBDP M353 Email claudia.swensen@uwa.edu.au