Reinventing education and reaching out to Chinese students – SPARK report
02 Jul 2018
FutureIndex supplies the University with regular reports that exhibit current trends, and give examples of innovations in the world of brands and marketing. The latest issue focuses on international marketing and recruitment.
Particular highlights featured in this issue:
The University of Edinburgh, who claim their emerging new Edinburgh Futures Institute is “reinventing education”. It will be based in the refurbished Old Infirmary, with aspirations to create a network across the whole university. The building itself, due to open in 2021, will keep the motto inscribed on its wall – ‘patent omnibus’ which means ‘open to all’. The institute will be a flagship for interdisciplinary research and learning, and a key marker for the future of research and learning.
Birkbeck’s Compass Project is a fund to help bring in 20 refugees and asylum seekers into UK higher education. As part of the initiative, Birkbeck is giving workshop support and taster days, often to students from incredibly difficult backgrounds across the world. The project really highlights how universities can be truly global in their outlook and transformative in their impact.
Other ideas from higher education marketing include:
Monash in Australia are showing their commitment to Chinese students with thorough language guides, as well as links to Chinese social media sites, making the most of codes to scan throughout. This is especially important as QR and WeChat codes are basic expectations for Chinese applicants, and really help to establish an initial connection.
Asking students to answer questions from potential applicants on the spot is a growing trend at the moment, as the answers given tend to be more authentic and real, as are the emotions. One such example is of science students at Newcastle University, answering all kinds of queries over five episodes.
Finally, from outside the sector:
Adidas have embraced VR experiences to launch their new trainers Deerupt. The GRID of the trainers is central to the design, so they created a VR experience that took influencers in major cities into the GRID, which they could change and disrupt in an immersive four-minute experience. Attracting crowds of people, collaborative VR experiences could be a fantastic way for universities to engage with rooms full of potential students in the future.
Following the current trend for six- and 15-second videos, YouTube have challenged ad agencies to modernise and tell classic stories in different video formats. Here are the results, with stories such as Goldilocks and Puss in Boots retold in short video formats.
Read about all of these and more in the full report below: