Recommendations: Education ChUser
Unlike EducationChUser which is a school project and is in its initial development stage, the educationsearch.net is a fully functional mashup. EducationSearch.net is a search tool which enables you to search by: Location, Career, and Industry/Salary. It also provides features like personalized searches. The personalized searches can be saved for future references. I think it would be premature to compare the Education ChUser mashup with the Education Search.net. I think Education Chuser has some great features. Features like Capability to Review a university, providing educational news feeds, and search for apartments feature near to the schools. This comparison is made to simply identify the improvements that we shall be able to do to the Education ChUser over the ongoing iterations if there are any, I am presenting the following analysis of findings about Education Select.
1) The first one being the Education Search Network covers the Universities or schools located thru out the U.S. Where as Education ChUser is limited geographically to four states i.e., Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois.
2) The Education Search covers several features like search by location, search by career, Search by Region, Reverse Search. With the Reverse search feature you are able to locate your choice of school or University by providing criteria like which area of career you are pursuing, by salary and also by providing Zip code. When you enter your criteria, a list of majors is displayed and you will choose the major and it provides you with the list of schools associated with the major.
3) It also provides the student the ability to search by University Name. Apart that, it has a list of schools in alphabetical order.
4) The Main advantage of using this site being, Registering to the site to have your own personal account where you can save all the search results. This is an added advantage to a site where you can evaluate your choices at a later time through out the application process and admission process.
5) The site also has a forum to help the prospective students. The students can post questions to get related information from other members.
6) The site has published several articles for different areas of students to assist them in their education goals pursuit. Starting from preparation to various aptitude tests until you get admitted to a school, the articles give valuable information and guide the prospective students appropriately.
The evaluation of Education Search site proves that there are no restrictions for improving the site. I am presenting these recommendations on behalf of Education ChUser team, after carefully analyzing the features, Similarities and distinctions between the two sites.
1) Covering all schools spread thru out different countries, which makes your site a global site.
2) The important feature that can be added to the Education ChUser site is the creation of a personal account to store the search information, by registering with the site.
3) The site should provide a feature where the student can enter his academic information into his personal account. The site should also provide a feature where the student shall be able to integrate his academic information along with the School search, to filter the schools that best fits his academic qualification. By doing this, the student would be able to identify specific schools that fit his criteria and he can prepare accordingly.
4) The Education ChUser site should be able to provide Search criteria by different means, for instance by providing the location, university name, by providing major or by choosing from a list of schools in alphabetical order.
5) The Powerful way to attract relevant crowd to the site, is by providing the information which helps them at different stages of their educational pursuit, along with other helpful information like providing information pertaining to their boarding and lodging facilities or by providing information about apartments that are near to schools.
6) Last but not least, I want to mention the usability of the site and also about the layout. The site should be userfriendly and with all the features easily accessible with appropirate layout in an organized manner. Without these it is difficult to convince the user and make him come back.
These are some of the recommendations that I presume will give the Education ChUser the capability to compete against any other educational related mash up sites.