About the Student Website

The Student website centralises all current student information, from enrolment, course planning, student admin, services and more.

It can be accessed using the ‘Current students’ link appearing alongside ‘Library’ and ‘Staff intranet’ in the black bar across the top of all University websites.

The website:

• structures information in a way that is meaningful to students, and not based on organisational structure
• makes it easier to find information about a student’s enrolment
• promotes self-help and self-administration
• improves awareness of services and facilities available to students
• brings our online experience for our students in line with other leading universities.

The website adheres to the University’s Web Content Strategy, as well as industry best practice and accessibility standards. Find out more about website management at the University.

Content

What appears on the Student website?

• All process-related “foundational” content (non-marketing) designed to guide students through common tasks or provide background information.
• Links to all University systems and applications.
• Notices about outages, key dates and other events or changes that may affect a student.
• Key study and University dates
• Links to news stories relevant to students.

What doesn’t appear on the Student website?

• Marketing and promotional “evolutionary” content.
  
• Functionality that’s provided by University applications such as Sydney Student, MyUni, Timetables.
• Course information, such as that found in handbooks, Leaning Management Systems (LMS) or Find a Course.
• WASM-protected content (that requires a UniKey to view).

How the Student website is structured

Content is organised by subject rather than audience type or organisational structure. Each subject may be split across several pages, and this could be where a subject is split into audience type – for instance faculty or study level.

This approach helps in a number of ways.

1. A user may fit into multiple audience groups, for instance we have many students completing combined degrees who may need information from more than one faculty.
   
   
2. For many subjects, there is usually a large amount of generic content that would be applicable to multiple audiences. This content can be presented as a single source of truth without the need to replicate it multiple places.

Using the website

Content is structured into categories, then topics, then subjects. Each subject has one or more content pages. The home page lists the categories. Selecting one of these displays the topics related to that category and selecting a topic will display the relevant subjects.

If there are several pages within a subject, a list of links is provided at the top of each page, and there is a ‘next’ and ‘previous’ link at the bottom.

Different subjects are linked together with related links.

A search box is located on the home page which will prioritise results from the Student website. If the University’s general search is used, users can filter results to show only results from the Student website.

Feedback and change requests

Change requests and feedback are managed and actioned by the Digital Experience and Communications team in consultation with subject matter experts.

Feedback

Every page on the Student website has a feedback tool at the bottom to report issues like:

• out of date content
• typos/errors
• broken links
• missing or incorrect content
• confusing or conflicting information.

This feedback tool is not for asking questions about courses or other student issues. The feedback form will not ask for contact or communication details from the user and no reply will be given to submitted feedback.

Updates and change requests

All change requests should be sent to [email protected] and include:

• content to be changed
• change to be implemented
• reason for the change
• repercussions of not making the change
• date the change MUST be actioned and why.

Requests will be triaged by the Digital Experience and Communications team and assessed as:

• Urgent: a change that is time sensitive and has immediate negative repercussions if not actioned – turnaround 1 business day.
• Normal: a change that needs to be made within the next 5 working days.
• Low priority: a non-time-sensitive change that may be subjective or require evidence and analysis.

Changes will be sent to appropriate subject matter experts for approval (if required).

If a change is approved, a Digital Experience and Communications team member will make and publish the change. The requestor will be notified that the change has been actioned (if requestor sent via email).

If a change is not approved, the team will contact the requestor to explain why.