It's not only JU that is 43, it's also its website!

Yesterday I visited the University of Jordan website out of curiosity and nothing else. It really let me down with its old-fashioned look. What made things worse was that I knew that what I saw was an updated version of the website that has been put live for less than 3 months. If I’m to put myself in a foreign student shoes I’ll never think of applying to a university with such a website; it hasn’t got enough information about courses and how to apply for them, many sections are disabled, empty or out of date, not to mention the tens of links that lead you to nowhere! In fact the first impression anyone is going to take about the website is that some kids in an elementary school designed the website for the university out of good deed! From the other side, as a Jordanian I won’t be proud of JU just by viewing its website. The site has no Arabic pages at all, something all the national universities in the world do have. In addition, it hasn’t got any information about the country, the city or the local people and traditions. As a university, one of the very essential aims should be to serve the local community, however if someone from a governmental or non governmental institution needs any help from the university they won’t be able to find what they are looking for on the website. Again out of curiosity –which is going to send me to hell one day- I decided to survey the websites of all Jordanian universities. My judging criteria was similar to the one used for the internationally recognised Webby Awards. The criteria were: Content, structure and navigation, visual design, update frequency, functionality, local identity, global identity, and overall experience. I gave each university website 0, 1 or 2 points for every criterion so that the full score becomes 16 points. Have a look at the results and don’t be surprised or shocked! Visit the websites and tell by yourself if you don’t believe! (And by the way the PL in the table denotes a public university and the PV denotes a private one).

Reading the table, I’m sure Balqa University should be feeling very lonely up there along with private universities. It’s a shame that it’s the exception as a public university to find its place in the upper half of the table while all other public universities refuse to leave their most favourite home, the bottom! We always hide behind the conspiracy theory to justify the fact that non of our universities was included in any of the top 10, 100 or even 1000 universities rankings. We should blame no one but ourselves. A university website is just one tiny measure of our weaknesses which opens several questions about the management, teaching and research quality in our universities.