With an ever increasing number of foreign students and professors on campus, Ewha is putting forth every effort to globalize its system, image, and atmosphere. One step in that effort was this semester’s large scale renovation of Ewha’s English homepage. An official in charge of website management at the Office of Public Relations (OPR) said, “Ewha has actually benchmarked the homepages of foreign universities and adopted the models to be of a similar structure with the newly renovated Ewha homepage.” 
The changes can be categorized into two aspects—improvement of the navigation structure and an enormous expansion in content. To improve navigation for different groups of users, the English homepage reorganized its main page to offer different lists of services to different target users. Also, the homepage has linked many more subsidiary and research organizations than before. “Whereas only web sites with English translations had been linked on the previous English homepage, now almost 90 percent of school organizations are linked to the homepage with introductory remarks, location information and contact numbers in English. The increase from about 30 to 90 percent is a drastic jump that Ewha has put much of effort into achieving,” said a representative at the OPR.
In the Academics section, newly added information includes information for foreign exchange students about school registration, major selection, courses offered, grades, and graduation. This information was only available from the Office of Global Affairs in the past.
Furthermore, the campus life section that used to mainly contain information on facilities has diversified its content ranging from instructions on how to get student identification cards to details on housing in the newly built Ewha Samsung International House.
For the first half of 2008, only seven English notices were uploaded to the homepage. This compares to 129 notices on the Korean News and Notices board between June 24 and September 12 alone. However, the OPR stated that it will be promptly updating new and notices on the English Homepage—cutting down the date gap to three to five days.
Shendy Ho (International Studies, 2) explained how inconvenient the old homepage was for her. “I used to have difficulty following up on the instructions of professors, even in classes taught in English. Assignments were posted on the Korean Cyber Campus, and I had to ask a classmate to guide me through the icons to finally discover the assignment,” she said.
“I think our new English homepage looks really neat and convenient. In order for Ewha to become truly global, I always thought that paying attention to foreign resident on campus was a vital obligation. Now, spotting foreign exchange students readily connecting themselves on the Ewha homepage or Ewha Cyber Campus makes me feel so proud,” said Park Sun-jung (Social Sciences, 1).
caption: The newly reformed Ewha English homepage can now better serve the demands of international visitors with timely news and advanced functions.