Right before finals week last semester, the university registrar asked that a brief announcement be placed just above the link to PeopleSoft in the Portal. The announcement let students know that grades would post on January 8. It went up on December 18, the second day of finals.
The result on January 8 was the busiest Portal day ever. (Pat or Scott will hopefully speak to the details of the usage numbers and Portal system performance.)
Clearly, the message was in the right place for a sufficient amount of time and helped to fulfill the compelling need of students to see their grades as soon as they were available. This was the first semester that the message went up at the beginning of finals week. It was also the first time that the message was nearly alone in terms of other content in the channel. My guess is that those were the chief contributing factors to the effectiveness of the announcement.
It’s also interesting to note where this information wasn’t publicized:- It didn’t go out in the finals week edition of the Student Announcements.
- It wasn’t in any of the finals week Campus Announcements.
- The Student Records site didn’t mention it.
- We didn’t put it on the Student Computing front page.