redrover » RR Explained

The Many Facets of Your Institution

Each constituency on your campus will have a different set of questions and something different they get excited about. This page is here to help you in these conversations at your school. The good news: we really do have something for everyone. Brandon Lytle of Lewis and Clark College also put together a value proposition page for his administration that can be borrowed and adapted.

Administrators

Lead Benefits

- Red Rover increases the accessibility and visibility of involvement. Increased involvement equals higher retention and more satisfied alumni.

- By facilitating the social and academic connections online, assessment data becomes available real time – empowering staff and faculty to focus their attention effectively.

- Positive use of technological trends. The school can be proactive in its approach to societal change.

Initial Concerns:

“We just spent a ton of money on “x,” won't this compete with our current initiative?”

A: Red Rover is a free, limited feature tool that does one thing our current systems do not do: it provides a platform for custom group recommendations and joining, embedded into Facebook. Once students have expressed interest in the group, we can encourage our student leaders to use whatever our primary system is to organize their groups.

Most businesses these days use a variety of web tools to solve various challenges, mixing and matching as necessary. By experimenting with Red Rover, for free, the school will be in a better position for the next wave of change. Red Rover will do more in the future. There are profound ramifications of having identity profiles of the students, but we can always decide to use more or not, at a later time. Using Red Rover now provides options for the future without currently competing or costing anything.

“What liability will the school have for how the students use this system?”

A: While it’s impossible to achieve zero liability, there is no reason using Red Rover would increase the liability of the school. The system is managed by a third party, just like Facebook, and the students are simply connected in the school’s network. Not unlike meeting in the main quad. The students are notified of the public nature of the system and they are free to choose their level of interest description. The Communications Decency Act provides immunity for website operators who run forums or facilitate connections, and this was held up in the 2003 ruling concerning match.com et. al. This protection is a foundational legal tenet that allows the internet to function.

In a recent case, a few distinctions were made. If the site asks direct questions that could lead to a discriminatory response, this may not be protected. In this case, however, the 9th Circuit did rule that asking very open ended questions did provide immunity to the website owner, and the site could not be held liable for the answers of the user. We believe the open ended "tag yourself" nature of Red Rover falls under "open ended questions," is thus covered by the latter part of this ruling, and Red Rover and any associated school are therefore granted immunity by the Communications Decency Act.

“Facebook is just a place for drinking pictures, we shouldn’t associate with it.”

A: Research has shown Facebook connections are an important facet of students bridging social capital, leading to their feelings of community. While it’s true some drinking pictures will inevitably end up on Facebook, Red Rover offers an opportunity to skim the positive community aspects of social connecting, while leaving any potentially damaging pictures buried in Facebook.

In short, Facebook is here to stay. Incoming students are using Facebook to connect with each other prior to the start of school and this cannot be stopped. Red Rover gives the school a way to participate in an exclusively positive manner, without putting either the student or the school in an uncomfortable position.

Information Technology

Main Benefit

- The system is a free hosted solution and does not contain sensitive information. (So benefit is easy without much worry.)

- Red Rover will eventually integrate with wiki’s and tools like delicious.com, making IT’s job easier (less maintenance) and more visible on campus.

- Red Rover will be open source, so if anyone in the dept. can program in Ruby, they can add features to the project.

Concerns

“We don’t want student emails to get out and be used for spam or sold to someone.”

A: We don’t either. Red Rover will never sell student contact information to anyone. The architecture of the system limits who can see emails. Student leaders only have access to contact information of students who have joined their groups. They probably have this information already.

If used correctly, Red Rover should reduce internal spam, by allowing students to send targeted emails to their group and giving students an easy way to cut off any group or individual leader that abuses the communication channel.

“Free always has a catch.”

A: Yes it does. This catch is easy to understand. The system is fairly simple, so we can offer it for free. We will grow the project by adding paid feature extensions that the school can choose to use or not (while still using the free core system.)

Librarians

Main Benefit

- We hope Red Rover can grow to experientially teach the university and the students about the semantic web. This should make your job really cool, efficient and even more visibly important. Much of the exciting thinking in this area is being done by librarians – nice work!

Student Leaders

Main Benefit

- Recruitment uses a lot of your time, this system does your recruiting 24 hours a day.
- By embedding group affiliation in Facebook, it's an easy reminder for group members to stay engaged.

Concerns

“I don’t want another thing to login to and maintain.”

A: Red Rover is designed to link out to the websites and web tools you already use. Stick with what works for you with your organization.

Because it’s a Facebook app, it will always be right there on your profile, one click away.

Workspace Text:

Their Value / What They Gain -

More Effective Orientation
Automatic Assessment
Free To Use
No additional burden / limited IT Involvement (we always recommend discussing plans with your IT personnel, every school is different from there.)
Easier Student Leader Management
Higher Retention (once we have the data)

Slogans -

A better orientation
A new orientation for a new generation
A new (student) orientation for a new (student) generation
A better way to introduce your students
A new welcome
A better welcome mat
The new welcome mat

Sample Posters/Banners/Postcards -

New Students

Overview - Current new student orientations usually involve, in wide variety, a set of welcome emails, postcards, phone calls followed up by a 1-10 day on site orientations including a tour, booths, activities, and mentor/mentee meetings etc. Students are orientating themselves online with SNS more and more before they arrive on campus. They search for roommates/classmates on Facebook, they join freshman class groups, they plan welcome events/parties online. Most of which is done organically without the involvement of the school.

Their Value / What They Gain -