"MyUB" personalizes the campus

By SUE WUETCHER
Reporter Editor

Freshmen are finding UB a little easier to navigate this semester, thanks to a new IT initiative that "personalizes" the campus.

MyUB, part of the Access99 computing initiative, is each student's customized portal, or Web site, that provides him or her with myriad information about UB via Web links and announcements. The information ranges from the academic­details on DARS, SOAR, the libraries and IT literacy­to quality of life issues such as schedules of events on campus, UB and national news, and the weekly menus in the residence dining halls.

The information for the site was gathered in consultation with "stakeholders" from all across the campus, among them Computing and Information Technology, Student Activities, Student Affairs, the libraries, the Provost's Office, the Academic Advisement Center and Student Services.

Each student's site is accessible through his or her UB IT user name. Although MyUB is a pilot program and only available to incoming freshmen at this time, it could be opened to all undergraduates by Fall 2000, says Rebecca Bernstein, director of the Electronic Media Unit and a developer of MyUB along with Jim Gorman and Rob Wright of Academic Computing Services in CIT.

"This is what happens when you take the concept of UB 101 and blend it with the concept of personalization," Bernstein says. "All the (Web) links students use are in one place. We're taking a huge university like UB and making it smaller."

Bernstein calls MyUB a "coaching and mentoring site," as well as an information site. It hosts all of the information students received during orientation, with categories and Web links changing as students progress. For example, orientation links were replaced with links that provide information that would be more helpful later, such as details about time management or advising or finding a niche on campus.

Students can add their own links, such as URLs for specific class Web sites or other sites they frequently use, or "turn off" categories that they no longer use. It's this "customizing" feature that makes MyUB unique among other educational and commercial sites, Bernstein points out. Rather than providing a set of "passive," fixed links for all students, the UB site "provides links that make sense, depending on that point in time," she says. "We've dug deeper to find the right sites...that match the needs of our students and make life better for them."

The MyUB team will deliver a presentation on the site next week at a meeting of WebDev, a professional group for major universities with Web development teams.

Bernstein notes that MyUB records about 731 logins daily, about 20 percent of the freshman class.

She added that the team had expected a daily response of from 3-7 percent.