The advancement of information technology in higher education has evolved into the marketing strategy of universities and their research on the internet. Therefore, there are indicators to measure the outreach of that presence in the world-wide web. But, what are its pros and cons?

We have talked and debated about the main rankings of higher education quality and reputation, such as Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) or Times Higher Education (THE).

To many – even though it’s difficult to compare the quality of a university against the other – these tools shows certain trends in reputation and management quality for certain institutions.

Web-based college reputation

With the evolution of the world-wide web, there are enormous challenges in the strategies for marketing in higher education, both for student recruitment, promoting research and improving reputation as knowledge based references.

An important indicator in previous rankings was the number of publications in specific indexed scientific journals. But, what happens when the institution is disseminating other types of research online?

Isidro F. Aguillo, José Luís Ortega and Mario Fernández, linked to the Spanish firm Cybermetrics Lab, explain at the Journal of Higher Education in Europe that:

“At the academic level, universities have a very important role as a means to communicate scientific and cultural achievements. Web publication by scholars is not only a tool for scholarly communication but it is also a means to reach larger audiences and in general a reflection of the performance of the institutions.”

The Webometrics Ranking of Universities

The Cybermetrics Lab, part of Spain’s Higher Council for Scientific Research prepares a Web ranking of universities called Webometrics and ranks over 4,000 universities in the world regarding presence and impact of their websites.

According to this portal, the tool looks to “promote academic web presence, supporting the Open Access initiatives for increasing significantly the transfer of scientific and cultural knowledge generated by the universities to the whole Society.”

Methodology

The ranking balances how a university is present on the world-wide web:

• Impact or visibility: external Inbound or backlinks to the page of the institution.
• Presence: number of pages linked to the institution’s primary web domain, subdomains and files.
• Openness: number of quotations by authors in Google Scholar.
• Excellence: number of academic articles related to teaching, research or administration in rich formatting (pdf, doc, ppt, etc.).

The best universities of the world, according to Webometrics

Regarding presence, the top universities in the United States lead the rankings, except for the UK’s University of Oxford.

Source: Webometrics 

 Is web presence a reflection of the quality of education?

Webometrics clears up that they don’t look to evaluate websites, their design or usability or the popularity of their contents according to the number of visits or visitors. Rather, they consider these as “proxies in the correct, comprehensive, deep evaluation of the university global performance, taking into account its activities and outputs and their relevance and impact.”

However Isidro F. Aguillo, explains that as this is a web-based ranking, “it is very dependent from universities adopting adequate policies and discrepancies due to malpractice in web presence are not rare.”

He underlines some inconveniences:

• Vulnerability to malpractices.
• Fragmentation of the impact when a university has more than one domain.
• When a school provides its data repository to another institution.
• Design flaws.
• Unorganized content.
• Centralized structure.
• Lack of international information.

Aguillo and the rest of the authors of the Journal of Higher Education in Europe paper agree that these indicators “should be used to measure universities' performance in conjunction with more traditional academic indicators.”

How is your higher education institution ranked? What do you think about these types of indicators?