Have You Seen Your Study Abroad Review Portal Lately?
Each day Abroad101 receives dozens of program evaluations from students that have been invited by either their home university, their provider or their host institution. We publish each review as a complete web page and tally them in listings by program, provider and host institution, plus in portals for each home school. As of today, 29,442 student reviews are on Abroad101 making it the largest source of study abroad stories. Visit the site to see your student reviews!
- Start at the university page:
- Enter your institution’s name in the search box and click to see your portal.
- If you want the ability to manage this portal and use the free software, simply reply with your contact info and we’ll get you a login.
Moms & Dads Use Abroad101
The target audience for Abroad101 is American college students looking for a semester, summer or short-term abroad. Provider managed, exchange and faculty-led programs are all listed. Parents and Advisors that support students end up being a big portion of our traffic. Based on Google Analytics data, we estimate that 20-25% of the visitors to Abroad101 are parents, searching on the keywords like “study abroad reviews” and trying to learn more about the options their children are considering.
As an advisor, you will find that your recommendations are validated when prospective students and parents read reviews. Providers will often use reviews in their discussion with students and parents as they find a well-informed student makes for a more successful student. Reading reviews will help parents become more comfortable with study abroad and to help them set expectations for what lies ahead. We hope you’ll mention Abroad101 Reviews in your parent communication and put a link to http://www.StudyAbroad101.com on your website to better prepare all.
How to Get Students to Write Reviews?
If you are one of the many institutions that has a legacy process for program evaluations or cannot require students to complete reviews, it will take some work to get reviews part of the study abroad conversation. So often we hear that it is hard to get students to do anything, let alone spend 20-30 minutes on a review. This is especially true when students feel that the activity has no benefit for them. However, they are inclined to share their stories if the exercise gives them a chance to tell their story, and that is exactly what they do on social media for hours a day!
If the student believes the review is good for them, they will generally participate. That takes some groundwork before they go abroad and as they prepare to return. One idea to get more engagement is to incorporate a review in your re-entry programming and use the review process as a step toward preparing the students to share their experience with others. Just like career counselors who tell students to prepare a good resume for a job search, we hope that study abroad advisors will help their students prepare for their return home by guiding them to submitting a thorough and candid review.
We’ve published some articles with messages that should resonate with students, including:
Why Should I Write a Study Abroad Review?
Top 5 Reasons to Write an Education Abroad Review
Getting More from Abroad101
Abroad101 is a tool to help you advance study abroad on your campus and is used by some of the most successful institutions in the field. Our goal is to see more students going abroad and getting the most from their experience. We also want those that go to be better informed beforehand and we want to help them turn that experience into a career building stepping stone when they return. The Abroad101 team is happy to answer any of your questions by email or phone. We also welcome the opportunity to walk you, and members of your staff though the system with an online demo of the back-end features of Abroad101 to see if our free program evaluation tool is right for you. The demo will show how you can see reports, compare your results with other institutions, set pre-approved/recommended programs and add custom questions to the standard Abroad101 review. Abroad101 also has promotional material for you to share with your students, so please let us know how we can help you.
As we approach our 10th anniversary, we’d like to say THANKS for all your support.
You can also see the best of the review stream through social media:
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