Portfolio

College of Education, St. Cloud State University

During my MBA graduate program at St. Cloud State, the College of Education gave me a position as College of Education Web Manager. The Associate Dean challenged me with the task of coming up with a vision for the College and its online presence. At the time, the college already had a considerably large web site due to its recognition as the first entirely electronic national accreditation by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. Contrary to this, most of the college's departments, offices, and centers did not have web sites and those that did were fragmented by vastly different designs. My task was clear, restructure the bulky College of Education site by disseminating its vast information into respective departmental sub-sites.

I knew then that this would be a difficult goal to accomplish, even in the two years I knew I would have with the college before I finished my graduate program. First of all, we needed to create sub-sites for the numerous departments, offices, and centers within the college. Secondly, these new sites would need a consistent theme, navigation and College of Education branding for the vast amounts of cross-linked information required in the accreditation process which takes place every couple of years, and for users taking advantage of more than one of the departmental sites. Finally, for those few departments which already had web sites, we would need to restructure them to fit with the new scheme.

With the two graduate assistants I trained myself, the Associate Dean (which changed during my time there), and a couple of faculty on special assignment, we were able to work with each area and a few focus groups to complete our goal of a complete overhaul of the departmental online presence for the College of Education.

Below are screenshots and links to the various sites of the College of Education web environment, the largest academic web environment on campus. The departmental sites associated with the College of Education are based on the same template to provide for increased usability. Users have an easier time surfing through the sites because the navigation is always in the same place and the underlying information architecture was purposely designed to be very similar.

College of Education, College (This site has been re-designed)	Child and Family Studies, Department
Counselor Education and Educational Psychology, Department	Educational Leadership and Community Psychology, Department
Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Sport Science, Department	Human Relations and Multicultural Education, Department
Center for Information Media, Center	Office of Clinical Experiences, Office
Office of Cultural Diversity, Office	Special Education, Department
Special Projects and Applied Research Center, Center	Teacher Development, Department