 Good morning. Welcome to the higher ed track here working at Boston, and I'm excited to kick things off. My name is Rachel Cherry, and this is Using WordPress in the World of Higher Ed. So today I'm gonna give a very brief overview of what it's like to use WordPress in higher ed, what it's like to work in higher ed, things like that. And so to kind of give you an idea, I don't know how many people in here actually work in higher ed. Most of the room? Awesome. That's really great. So you're gonna be familiar, not much new to you, and so let's get started. Also before I will mention, I brought lots of swag and stickers up here. So if you want some swag, come and grab it, and we'll talk about that a little bit more throughout the talk. So who am I? My name is Rachel. I'm the director of WP campus, which is a community for people that use WordPress in higher ed. And we have a really active Slack account, and we hold several conferences throughout the year. And so if you are not involved and want to join us, please do. You can do so on our website, on our Get Involved page. Sorry, I thought for a second I hadn't spelled it wrong. And so yeah, check that out. I'm also a software engineer, and I'm a higher ed and accessibility consultant. So that's what I work on. I have extensive experience in higher ed. These are all my little ID cards. Y'all are probably familiar with that. The ongoing theme in my cards is just lots and lots of hair. But my first job in college was, or outside of college, Mississippi University. For women, I was their print designer for the entire university. So you can imagine what that was like. It was, to be fair, it was a pretty small university. It's still kicking. It does not teach only women, even though it is in the name. So just imagine that drama. My first full-time web position was at Samford University, where I worked for a couple years. That was my first foray into the world of CMS, as well, where we used Ectron. Ectron was bought out a couple years ago, I believe, and now it's called EpiServer. But it was an ASP.net framework. So that was tons of fun. And then I moved on to the University of Alabama, which is also my alma mater. I was there about six years. That's where I started using WordPress. It was part of my job description slash requirements. When I took that job, I had never touched WordPress, and they said you had to learn WordPress. So I learned it and set up this multi-site thing for the College of Engineering in like six months. Had to build all these themes and plugins. It was quite the deep dive into the pool. But it was a lot of fun, and it was my foray into WordPress, and here I am. So we will talk about campus a lot. I just wanted to make sure I touch on it and really explain what it is a little bit more, and if you want some more information about what we do. I already mentioned we have a Slack account that's fairly active, where it's a great place to come in and chat with other people that are in higher ed and using WordPress. You don't have to be in higher ed to get involved. You're free to join. We're just open to anyone who wants to be involved with our mission and just kind of be involved with our community. You don't have to be in higher ed to speak at our conferences. We're just looking for a good variety of WordPress talks that are kind of focused on higher ed. One of the main reasons that we started this community is because we went to camps like this, and we left with that feeling that just no one was talking about the stuff that we work on. So we wanted to have our own event, and that's kind of how campus started back in August 2015. I always love sharing this little screenshot that I grabbed. So when we announced campus in 2015, the WP Tavern, which is a big WordPress newsletter, they released an article about it, which was great, and someone came along, this dear friend, Jeffrey, and said, it'll be a long way to go before WordPress will work in higher ed. And one of our founding members, Curtis, happily chimed in and proved him wrong, that WordPress is being vastly used in higher ed. A lot of popular plugins for WordPress were built in higher ed. For example, I don't know who's familiar with IPI security, that was built in higher ed. And then kind of moved out into the enterprise space. But so there's a lot of action in higher ed that you'll learn more about as we go on. So some main reasons why WordPress is great in higher ed, obviously cost is a big factor. I mean, we all know that WordPress is free, like cats and dogs are free, but it's that baseline freeness goes a long way in higher ed to help. That way we can use those budgets towards other things like humans or things that maybe we don't, if we want to buy software that we don't have the power to build, but we can utilize WordPress free out of the box. The community in open source is a big factor. I do believe that higher ed is a great space for open source. It kind of really fits the same mission statement of just trying to educate and share our work and what we're doing. So WordPress is a great environment, I'm sorry, higher ed is a great environment for utilizing open source and software just like WordPress. The extendability, what you'll learn is that WordPress in higher ed space is really unique and there's a lot of really wide vast amount of solutions. So being able to plug and play plugins in the environment, being able to turn off functionality here or turn it on here, really goes a long way and then user management. So WordPress and higher ed, or just higher ed in general, there are lots of campus users. So we're not just talking about people that like log in and view your website, we're talking about people that are managing content. Because what happens a lot in higher ed is you'll have like a web team of like two to three people, and then you'll have, you know, departments vast spread out around your campus that they're only needing to log in to manage the content. And then your web team is managing the code. So being able to manage users and capabilities and their roles, really limiting what they can do, or customizing what they can do really goes a long way for using WordPress in this space. I did want to touch on the fact that while WordPress is used a lot in higher ed, something you'll see also a lot in universities is that people will use multiple platforms. Like it's not like one or all, it's not like we're only doing WordPress. You'll see a lot of CMSs, you'll see a lot of Drupal and Joomla, you'll see a lot of proprietary CMSs too, like on the update, terminal four, things like this. And what's really great about that is that there are a lot of needs and in higher ed. And so WordPress is a great tool, but it's, you know, it's not always the right tool. So you'll see a lot of this, you'll see a lot of teams supporting multiple platforms, whether it's open source or proprietary. You call this can be a pro and a con to in higher ed space, because obviously the more platforms you're using, the more people you need, the more resources you need to support different platforms. And so you'll see a lot of things like this throughout. So last week, I forgot to mention, we had our WP campus conference last week in St. Louis, which was really great. We do record all our sessions and they should be online within the next week or so. So to say all that, John Eggman, who's here, I don't know if he's in the room, but he's here speaking this weekend, he gave a great talk called the grass is always greener and he talked about all the CMSs available in higher ed. And he shared this slide. So this, this reporting company did a bunch of research and CMSs and they gave all the CMSs their own Game of Thrones character. And so I highlighted WordPress. So we're Tyrion Lannister. You had to buy their survey to figure out why they gave us Tyrion Lannister. So I don't know exactly their reasoning, but that made me laugh. I like Tyrion. So so I think we're doing pretty good there. But this also is a great visual of like how many CMSs there are all across the board. So there are, you know, WordPress and Drupal and Droomla, which are open source and pretty much most of the rest, not all the rest, but a lot of these are proprietary ones that you pay for. So there's but there is lots of data showing that WordPress is pretty popular in higher ed and it's growing. This was also a slide from John's talk. And so there are, you know, there's, there's lots of surveys which all say a variety of things, but their data is showing that WordPress is becoming more and more popular. I'll talk later about some stigmas that belong in that exist in higher ed, that kind of really damaged WordPress's growth. But thankfully, a lot of the stigmas are going away and WordPress is gaining more popularity. So if you aren't familiar with higher ed, or familiar with enterprise kind of space, I, I'm familiar with both. The last two years, I actually worked for the Walt Disney Company, doing a lot of work there. So when I got to Disney, it was very familiar, like our process were very familiar. So I do always like to compare that WordPress and higher ed is pretty much very identical to WordPress and the enterprise, obviously a big difference being that higher ed's on a budget. So you'll see a lot of that in the work that we do in higher ed in the sense that you're having to do a lot of these things. You're having to manage like hundreds of websites. You're having to manage hundreds to thousands of users. But you're having to do it with like a web team of like two to three people. If you're lucky, I was always a team of one. I was the designer. I was the developer. I was the content strategist. I was the QA. I was everything. So when I got to Disney, that was another big difference was that I was finally on this team of like, you know, 10 plus to 20 people engineers. I'd never had that before. And so but in higher ed, I was having to be everything. And so you get really creative. You get really efficient. And so that happens a lot. Another big difference between I guess higher ed and enterprise is that what I did learn in enterprise is that a lot of the work you're doing is very like very in the moment, you're like making a change on your site, like, you know, on the Disney blog, we were throwing up stuff that would help to promote a movie that came out, you know, and it's gone. You know, but in universities, they exist for the long game. So a lot of your work has to kind of stick around for a while. And so you're doing all of these, you know, big enterprise level work and code and changes. And it has to stick around for the long game. Another great talk we had last week from Jeremy Fell, he talked about five things he's learned five years at a university, which was a great talk that I recommend checking out. He's been in Washington State University for five years. He talked about all the things he's learned, the failures and successes. It was a really great talk. So this is obviously a very, very short sampling of some universities that use WordPress. I try to find some like regional ones to kind of give you a clue. Boston University uses it. Yesterday, Ashley Kaloje gave a great talk about code review. But she uses WordPress here at Boston University. MIT uses it, Georgetown. A lot of these universities, this is a small list. I've given this talk before where I like printed them all out, which was silly because it was like, you know, slides upon slides and no one's reading, but it was a great visual of like how many universities are using it and it's becoming more and more popular. So what are some big areas that are for our environments in WordPress and higher ed? So if we had our own game, our own Game of Thrones in higher ed, these are a few of the things that would win out. Number one, being multi-site. Multi-site is huge in higher ed. It's used a lot for things like faculty and student blogs and other publishing platforms. I pretty much always used it for like the college of engineering, you know, my first site, you know, our main site was the main site on the platform and all the academic departments were sub-domains on the multi-site network. What's really great about that is I was able to make a parent theme that was on our main site and then all the academic departments were child themes that, you know, pretty much looked very similar to the main site that had just slightly different functionality for all those departments. So multi-site, and I pretty much repeated the process at the student affairs, which had like 50 or 60 websites. All the departments had child themes. They all shared the same child theme. They all looked the same. You're just going in and you're just, you know, tweaking tiny things. I know Ronnie's in here. We had, Campus Press has, we're a present multi-site platform with four million blogs. Is that still right, Ronnie? Okay. We had Ronnie on our podcast a few weeks back where they talked about Campus Press' multi-site platform. It's been around for a while and this is one multi-site network with four million blogs, which is just insane. So UBC has a publishing platform that has, you know, over 10,000 sites with over 30,000 users. And this data is a little old for me, so I imagine it's even gone up. But this is what's most common in higher ed with multi-sites is these publishing platforms. So that way faculty can come on board and say, I need a blog for my research and they can quickly set something up. NYU also has a similar publishing platform with over 2,000 sites. So another common thing with WordPress and higher ed is like news and distributing content. So I will mention some, the Bostonia, which is Boston University's alumni, is that actually in the back? They built out this really cool thing for this article that they wrote about, basically it was like a basketball story. But it was really cool. I recommend checking it out. They used the REST API to kind of tell the story and you could submit messages to it. And so there's some really cool stuff happening with WordPress and higher ed when it comes to all this amazing content that we have. We have news, we have research, we have all this stuff happening. So on top of that, the REST API is really helpful in WordPress and higher ed because there's a lot of physical, I guess, hardware in higher ed. You think about like, like kiosks around campus and things like that, that people can find to share information. You know, these are examples where you could use the WordPress API to, you know, jump in and share information for kiosks or things like digital signage that you see around campus, stuff like that. There's a lot of implementations that you can use with your data. And so when the REST API came around a few years ago, that was a really great turning point for higher ed because it gave us the opportunity to distribute our content in a cleaner way. Because before that, what you would see a lot of is copying and pasting. People duplicating content and putting it on their site instead of retrieving it from one tree source. And so you get a lot of outdated and stale content. And so when the API came along, where we could easily share text and messaging throughout campus, that was a big plus for us. So news websites are really big. This is Berkeley's news website and it's in WordPress. News websites and calendar of events, things like that are really popular uses for WordPress in higher ed as a way to distribute content. And then especially when the API came along for news because if you can imagine having like a central news site that had all the news for the entire campus, but if you could tag it going back to engineering, if you could tag all of your news sites about engineering in a way that the engineering site could pull from the API and show on their site, then you're organizing your news better, you're not breaking it out into silos. And so things like this really go a long way in higher ed. Accessibility is really important in higher ed. So if you are an organization that receives any kind of federal funding, you are required by law to be accessible. So that is most higher education institutions on all, but most of them, especially if it's like a state institution, you are required to meet what's called section 508. And so, and now basically the standards have been updated, so it's WCAG 2.0AA. And so this is big in higher ed. We talk about it a lot because obviously it's very important not just on a personal level that we all should be making our websites accessible, but in higher ed for the most part we are required by law. So we talk about it a lot. And there's some really cool tools being built by universities to make sure they are testing all their sites and I recommend you check out Washington State University. Jeremy Feld is their lead guy over there and they have a lot of cool tools that they build to test their accessibility and it's all open source in their GitHub repo or their GitHub organization. So this is just one example. They built this dashboard. They use, I believe they use Pali which is a great tool. I will say I'm doing accessibility workshop and I will deep dive into this if you want to join. So what this tool does is it goes and scans all their sites and puts the data here and when you click on a particular domain it will go more specific. But this is open on the web like anyone can go look at this which is really great. And a lot of universities do stuff that's similar to this so that they can keep track. There's a lot of great tools that you can pay for too. Things like site improve and they just change their name level access. Companies like that provide tools that you can pay for and it's really great services because they'll do all the scanning they'll send emails to everyone they'll keep everyone on their guard and at my last university we had site improve, we loved it made a game out of it and if you had zero problems you got swag and so we made a lot of fun out of it and in the end everyone wins because we had more accessible content and websites. So Gutenberg is obviously a big topic going on right now in the WordPress space. I'm not going to talk about it too too much because there's another talk later. At what time? One something? One ten, Jen and Brian are going to talk about their experience on their campus at North Carolina State implementing Gutenberg and so I highly recommend it they talked at campus last week and it was a great talk and they have lots of really fun graphics I stole this slide from their talk and so if you're interested in how Gutenberg is being implemented in a higher ad, I recommend checking it out even if not higher ad it's a great talk on change management which is kind of the most of the point of their talk is talking about how this big change coming to their campus and how they worked through it how they make sure people are educated because that's really going to be one of the big problems with Gutenberg is this huge new thing and communicating to your clients and to your users about what it is and how to use it to make sure it is a clean transition so I recommend checking out their talk a little later today so I just kind of wanted to talk about a few other really important areas that we concern ourselves with a lot in higher ad is like I just mentioned change management is really big because of our enterprise level usage in higher ad we just have tons and tons of contributors and users give tons of people that you're bringing onto your platform you know every day I think there was last week at campus someone mentioned that their platform they add a new site every day like a new a whole new onboarding every single day so if you don't have really great processes and governance installed on your campus it's going to be more of a struggle because you're not familiar with governance it's really just the idea of kind of like having structure and rules and guidelines or having kind of like having committees and things like that to kind of help bring everyone together and make sure that it's understood you know what's going to happen if you don't have that it's a lot of chaos it's a lot of catching up it's a lot of confusion and so governance is really important security and privacy is really big in higher ad we do have to abide by FERPA a lot and basically the Family Educational Rights Privacy Act is that right? Family something sorry but what it means is for the WordPress is that a lot of campuses WordPress to hold personal identifying information WordPress really wasn't built for that and so you will see a lot of proprietary systems involved when it comes to anything any kind of online forms like admissions forms stuff like that you'll rarely ever see WordPress being used for an admissions form because of these privacy concerns because if someone were to get into your WordPress database it would be bad learning management systems are big using WordPress in the classroom is big there are a variety of LMS WordPress plugins that are being used things like LearnDash and others and so helping faculty members use WordPress to teach whether it's like online textbooks or it's just their research blog this is being used a lot and discussed a lot we do have some faculty members they would be campus it's always valuable to hear how they're using it and how they're getting their students to use it whether it's a lot of universities will have student blogs too so students can set up their own blog and talk about what they're doing which is a whole other issue of governance making sure student blogs don't become stale when students leave there's a lot of systems that you had to put in place when you have these things because there's a lot of turnover in higher ed especially with students mostly but making sure that your websites are kept up to date, not stale and accessible content strategy I don't think I have to explain in higher ed like the crazy mega menus you can have because you have all of these colleges with all of these departments with all of these student organizations stuff like that making sure that that is not confusing on a higher ed website is a struggle it's tough especially if you're a university homepage because everyone wants to be on the homepage and you're the person in charge having to tell that person no you're not important enough to be on the homepage I think that's how sliders have to become so popular because it was easy to put someone's link in a slider and then back to research and faculty, student blogs this is really great content in higher ed it's in a sense marketing talking about the cool work that your people are doing it's a way to recruit students it's a way to recruit grants so having an easy setup so that a faculty member can come in and say I need a blog and it's not going to take you you're not going to have to stop for a month to set it up is really vital and so a lot of universities they're setting up these systems so that they can easily use these platforms so that it's really easy to onboard faculty and students to help create this really valuable content for their university so a few other things I've seen a few universities build intranets with WordPress a good friend of mine works at the University of Florida in their hospital and he showcased his intranet at Hyde Web a few years ago and it was really fascinating to see what they build a lot of times they're using things like BuddyPress which can be really helpful so it's a really great way to set up an intranet it's really easy employee directories are huge in Hyde being able to track down that faculty or staff member that works in that very specific field and that very specific building can be really helpful I think I've built like four or five of them and so that's used a lot digital signage is something that is used a lot in Hyde Red that I haven't seen tons of WordPress implementations of I do believe there's a WordPress plugin that we featured at our first campus event that's cool but I haven't seen a lot of that to be honest that's probably a need that would go far if someone wanted to build like a really nice digital signage system throwing that bone out there because it would be probably used a lot because the stuff I have seen is not that great it's not that great at all I think at my last university you had to have a Windows computer with Windows software to like be able to update the digital signage which is not good it was pretty bad setup campus maps are big I don't see a lot of like I don't know like WordPress plugins doing that but there are lots of really great setups out there for campus maps and virtual tours that are really unique and that space would be helpful some of that stuff can be really cool things that people are doing with just having like audios, you can go on self tours QR codes that we all love so much things like that really that is a cool space for them when it comes to campus tours another big thing is crisis calm if you've ever been in higher ed or worked in higher ed crisis communications really important with bad weather a lot so I'm from Alabama where tornadoes are really common and my last university where I was at Tesco Loosa we called it tornado alley we had a lot of tornadoes in 2011 we had an F5 come through it killed about 250 people throughout the state and 60 of those were in our town so we do a lot of crisis communication because we need to make sure that people especially students that are in our guard to make sure they know when something's happening and so crisis calm is another big vital need in higher ed I don't know if there's really any WordPress solutions for that but a lot of people are setting up their solutions a lot of times on WordPress installs and so it does kind of go hand in hand and what that usually looks like is like banners at the top of the page and make sure people know what's going on sending out text messages and making phone calls whenever we did have a crisis communication event you hear every single phone in our office would start ringing things like that so that's another big use case that we have and then a few just a few more access control request systems I put this because I built one out we had I worked in this fancy engineering building lots of research labs and we needed to be able to handle requests for people that wanted access to the buildings so we built off the system that they fill out a form and it would go through this whole workflow because I had to go through permissions and everything and then eventually it would go and be approved and that would be sent to the people that actually manage the access control the access so that was pretty cool digital access asset management is is pretty important higher ed there's a lot of assets whether it's just like photos higher ed loves PDFs love them love them so much they want to marry them they play and so lots of PDFs single sign on is big and higher ed because we do have we want to make that pretty easy so you will see a lot of implementations with Active Directory and LDAP academic catalogs course curriculum things like that are really big and higher ed I don't really know any WordPress solutions for that that gets tricky because you have to keep things you know set and time and so that's I've worked with some stuff for that before it's a little tricky but it's a it's a fun project to work on and then making sure kind of going back to WordPress in the classroom making sure we have things for presentations and lectures I there's a couple WordPress solutions for that of you know allowing people to quickly set up slides that could be used for something like this or in the classroom so before I stop for today I want to talk about a few stigmas that live within higher ed so I mentioned earlier that WordPress did struggle for a little while in higher ed and anyone who's been in higher ed long enough maybe more than like five years or so probably has had a situation where they've had to convince an IT professional on their campus that WordPress was okay and so in my opinion a lot of that stigma comes from as a security stigma and I talk about this a lot about generally what happens to kind of give background on this stigma is you know a few years back I don't know who remembers that WordPress marketing that it's easy with five minute install and this ran in higher ed where you know people saw people with limited budget saw easy and they ran after it and they set up a lot of WordPress websites well they probably didn't have governance they didn't have rules set in place they didn't have a structure to like what's going to happen after you set up this WordPress website they didn't have a plan and so what happens after a couple years of this website being ignored because it happens a lot you'll get an eager faculty member who jumps in and wants a blog and then you know they get tired of it after a few weeks because they didn't have a plan either and after a couple years of being ignored it gets hacked so you see a lot of work for a while there you would see a lot of WordPress getting hacked in higher ed and that wasn't necessarily WordPress's fault not that they're like 0% blame but that's what happens when you have software that's not being maintained and being managed and that's kind of going back to what I said earlier WordPress is free like cats and dogs are free you still have to have a web professional to step in and manage it make sure it stays up to date you know at some point in the last so many years they implemented auto updating which really helped a lot for this kind of situation but it's not the permanent solution so after all these sites get hacked you get a lot of IT professionals who are managing these servers and having to deal with all these hacks getting really upset, getting really frustrated and then you have like eager web developer comes along and says we want to use WordPress and they're like no and so then you enter the world of higher ed politics where you have to convince and make your point argue your case come up with that plan so for a while there WordPress did have a really bad security stigma I think it's still around a little bit but I do believe it's fading away it's getting better WordPress is growing in the higher ed space so a lot of changes and a lot of arguments went into that so we're getting better a lot of the stigma of it's just for blogging so that definitely lives in the higher ed space a little bit there also seems to be a general distrust of free things in higher ed because if we pay lots of money for it then it's got to be great right so they just kind of look at free sometimes and kind of see red flashy lights but those are very small low on the totem pole stigmas that are fading away but sadly what does happen a lot in higher ed is these platforms are being chosen by people that aren't really using them they're being chosen by administrators that just kind of look at the dollar signs and they're not looking at that long term plan and so this can so you see a lot of that happening one who's worked in higher ed is familiar with the politics of higher ed especially when it comes to web communication so I have a few minutes left just want to share I would check out our schedule from WP campus last week if you're interested in what we're talking about in higher ed all the slides are there and then our videos are being processed right now so they'll be online probably in the next week week to two and then our main campus website is where a lot of the action happens our blog, our podcast, things like that to kind of keep up to date and add to that over the next few months we have a really cool group and then kind of reiterating what I said if you want to get involved you can check out our website to join our Slack you don't have to be in higher ed and then we do have an annual virtual conference that's usually in January and then we have an in-person conference which is always mid-July which was last week in St. Louis if you are interested at all I have tons of swag up here from our conference last week I have stickers and pens we have an adorable wapoo that we call edgy wapoo so if you want to come find me and get some buttons we also have little coupons for our store if you want to buy something we have fun little t-shirts and I always like to close on this quote I do love it a lot we put it on our shirts last year because it is so true the good things that we build and this people that work in higher ed they feel what I am putting down because when you work in this community in this industry you build these great things that really make an impact on people's lives and so WordPress plays a role in that a little bit when we use it to help build higher education and with that I think I have like 3-4 minutes 3 minutes to have any questions so she asked when you are faced with resistance of using WordPress how do we counter that which is a great question data is really any kind of data that you can provide and kind of going back to the plan what is really important is showing how it is being used which we have a lot of data on of how it is being used in higher ed how it is successful showing all the other sites that use it especially some of these larger universities that are using it but coming up with a plan for how you are going to maintain it because it is easy to set it up but the hard part comes when updating it making sure that support is handled things like that as much data as you can get is really what usually drives it home for a lot of people anyone else come find me if you want swag a little bit and come to me sensibility after that and hope you have a great day