Study Abroad Newsletters

studyabroad.com Newsletter - Volume 22

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WHAT'S NEW WITH STUDYABROAD.COM

Welcome to the mid-summer edition of the Studyabroad.com Newsletter. For the many individuals who signed up for this newsletter during the NAFSA conference in Washington, we welcome you!

We have been very busy this summer with making improvements to our system, planning our Back-to -School marketing, and keeping up with customer requests.

Here are some of the changes you can look for:

Improved Search by Subject

We have expanded our list of subject categories from 50 to 107. Each category is then sub-divided by geographic region, making it much easier for students to find programs which offer courses which meet their needs. While we expect that students will continue to use the Search by Subject as their primary means of searching, we anticipate that the subject search will become more and more popular.

If you are responsible for a programs' listings, please see that we have accurate subject data for your programs. The best way to provide us with this data is with our form at http://www.studyabroad.com/update

Search by Subject within a country.

Due to a great deal of student input, we now allow users to search for subjects once they have picked a country. Our "by country" format has been modified so that a student selects a country and first gets back a page with the Hot Buttons and text links for all of the programs which we link to (advertisers). At the bottom of this page the student has the option to search the country by subject or view the full set of free listings for that country.

The "by language" search for Intensive Language programs also takes on the new format of presenting advertiser links before offering a link to the free listings.

Electric Library Links

We now offer links throughout the site to the Electric Library. The Electric Library is an online service which makes it possible to conduct real research over the Internet, using a deep database of reliable sources. With the Electric Library, any person can pose a question in plain English and launch a comprehensive, simultaneous search through more than 150 full-text newspapers, hundreds and hundreds of full-text magazines, two international newswires, two thousand classic books, hundreds of maps, thousands of photographs, as well as major works of literature and art.

Users who conduct a search will receive back descriptions of the found sources and will be presented with the option of signing up for a 30 day free trial of the E-Library service.

Easier Access to Studyabroad.com Discussion Boards

We have streamlined the process of linking to the Studyabroad.com Discussion Boards. This is an area where users can post messages and read and respond to messages posted by others. Users no longer need to register for this area; they can simply type in a user name a enter. The Discussion Boards are accessible through the Studyabroad.com Forum and have become quite popular in recent months. Students and educators have found this to be the ideal venue for posting questions and announcements.

More to Come

We're not done yet. Before Labor Day arrives we expect to announce some more system improvements, so stay tuned.

NAFSA CONFERENCE FOLLOWUP

Thank you to everyone who took the time to stop by the Studyabroad.com booth on at the NAFSA conference in May. We had the opportunity to talk to hundreds of old and new friends. We also signed up more than 100 new advisors for our "user guide" mailing list which will be distributed in a mid-August.

The winners of our Studyabroad.com Golf Shirts are:

Gladys Jones: University of Alabama in Huntsville
Gregg Orifici: World Learning
Matthew Schulze: NAFSA
Mary Ann Cooper: University of Kentucky
Lois Fuller: Widener Universit
Thanks to all who dropped their cards for this give-away.

LANDON ELECTED TO NAFSA MicroSIG STEERING COMMITTEE

Studyabroad.com's Mark Landon was elected to MicroSIG's Steering Committee during the annual MicroSIG business meeting in Washington in May. Mark will serve a 2 year term.

MicroSIG is a NAFSA Special Interest Group dealing with Computers and Technology. MicrSIG operates the Technology Education Center at the annual NAFSA conference each year and is also involved in technology sessions at Regional NAFSA conferences.

Mark will be involved in presenting sessions at both the Region VIII conference in Pittsburgh and the Region X conference in New Brunswick this year.

INTERNET USER TIP

TracerLock is a free service which can monitor search engines for you and notify you by e-mail when a new instance of a search term is found. For example, if you tell TracerLock to monitor search engines for the name of your organization, you will be notified when pages linking to your website are found on the web. Likewise you can register any terms or subjects of interest to you. This is a great way to keep current with what's new.

You can register for Tracerlock at http://www.peacefire.org/tracerlock/

STUDYABROAD.COM GENERAL INQUIRY LIST

This is another reminder that Studyabroad.com maintains a free distribution list for student inquiries.

Every day we receive unsolicited general inquiries from students looking for a study abroad program, or looking for advice. These inquiries cover a lot of ground....US students looking for a program abroad...students outside of the US looking for ESL opportunities, all types of students looking for financial aid information, students looking for advice about a particular city...just to name a few.

Once a week, we bundle all of the week's inquiries into a single email message and distribute it to our distribution list. This allows study abroad professionals to help students with their questions and problems and it also allows program recruiters many opportunities to open a dialog with prospective students.

If you would like to receive this weekly distribution, send a message to inquiry_list@studyabroad.com with subscribe as the subject.

NEW ADVERTISERS

Once again, we have a lengthy list of new Studyabroad.com advertisers. Thanks to all of you who support our service!

Academia Atlantika
Arizona State University- American English Culture Program
Bentley College
Brooklyn College-Study Abroad
Chinese University of Hong Kong
Educational Testing Service (ETS)
English Learning Centre of Toronto
Espanol Del Plata
Eurocentres
Hattori Foundation - The Yamasa Institute
ICS - International Colleagues School of English
IMAC (Instituto Mexico Americano de Cultura)
Intercultura Spanish Language Center
International House - Frieburg
ITS Tours Limited
Lexia Exchange International
Liden & Denz - Russian Language Center
Linguaviva
Macquarie University
Malaca Instituto Club Hispanico, S.L.
Monash University
New York University-International Studies
Northwestern University-Study Abroad
Oxford Programme for Undergraduate Studies (OPUS)
Rutgers University -Study Abroad
School For Field Studies
Tech Rome
University of Bath
University of Melbourne
University of Minnesota-Study Abroad
University of Ulster
Village English
Worldlink Education in China

TRAFFIC REPORT

Here are the latest usage statistics, through June of this year. The first number is total pages views and the second is number of visitors to the site.

Traffic in Total Pages Served:

June 1998: 224,635 (unique hosts: 37,692)
June 1997: 145,747 (unique hosts: 28,648)

May 1998: 266,372 (unique hosts: 51,974)
May 1997: 187,718 (unique hosts: 39,108)

April 1998: 253,806 (unique hosts: 47,279)
April 1997: 183,284 (unique hosts: 37,240)

March 1998: 281,251 (unique hosts: 49,649)
March 1997: 173,087 (unique hosts: 35,924)

February 1998: 337,958 (unique hosts: 53,783)
February 1997: 204,217 (unique hosts: 37,822)

January 1998: 347,805 (unique hosts: 53,325)
January 1997: 200,764 (unique hosts: 38,020)

December 1997: 203,200 (unique hosts: 31,424)
December 1996: 115,556 (unique hosts: 23,365

November 1997: 257,979 (unique hosts: 40,356
November 1996: 192,587 (unique hosts: 37,213)

October 1997: 343,837 (unique hosts: 54,096)
October 1996: 157,726 (unique hosts: 29,774)

September 1997: 238,779 (unique hosts: 41,789)
September 1996: 149,185

August 1997: 185,182 (unique hosts: 37,430)
August 1996: 95,543

July 1997: 137,117 (unique hosts: 28,099)
July, 1996: 68,427

TOP TEN LIST

Here are the top 10 universities for June in terms of usage of our system. Following the university name is the total number of studyabroad.com pages viewed from computers in their system.

1. University of Minnesota: 825
2. University of Washington: 612
3. (tie) University of Texas: 487
3. (tie) Harvard University: 487
5: University of California Berkeley: 453
6. University of Michigan: 423
7. University of Indiana: 348
8. University of California Irvine: 335
9. University of Pittsburgh: 328
10. University of Oregon: 311

And here's a quick look at the top three .COM domains visiting our site:

1. AOL (America Online): 22,593
2. UU Net: 4704
3. AT&T: 2541

studyabroad.com
265 E. Dutton Mill Road
Aston, PA 19014
USA

(610) 364-0400
http://www.studyabroad.com

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