Hillsdale College aims to release a new website and app by this fall, with the website designed to unify all of the college’s current websites into one, and the app will place the college’s online teaching material in one location. 

Executive Director of Online Learning Jeremiah Regan ’08 said Hillsdale’s new website will centralize its many sites, simplifying navigation for students and faculty. 

“If you go to hillsdale.edu right now and you click on the banner on top, you can go to something like 40 different websites,” Regan said. “If you’re trying to learn something about what’s going on on campus, where do you go? Depends, right?”

The college is doing a complete online overhaul, Regan said. The new website will make it easier to navigate Hillsdale’s resources and keep up-to-date with campus activity. 

The transition period to the new website will be in phases, Regan said.

“It won’t be turn-key and everything you know goes away,” Regan said. “There’ll be transition periods and there’ll be announcements so that you’re not wondering, ‘Well, I used to go through this complicated pathway to get to this information. And that’s gone.’ There’ll be briefings on how you do it now, but it’ll be easier.” 

Along with the new website, Hillsdale plans to create an app that will centralize its teaching resources for a growing audience, and allow the college to branch out into other forms of media, Regan said. 

Juan Dávalos, executive director of brand management, said the college’s current websites were not built to teach the level of people interested in its resources. 

“Our current websites are very old, and they’re a product of many years of development by different people that have done a great job, but nothing that was prepared for something like teaching such a large number of people,” Dávalos said. 

Chief of Staff Kyle Murnen ’09 said the target audience for the app has been increasing.

“The percentage of people taking our online courses on their phones has steadily increased for the last five years. We want to make it easier for people to take those courses — and to learn with Hillsdale in a variety of ways — through the app,” Murnen said.

Dávalos said College President Larry Arnn charged the college with the goal of teaching 50 million people by 2030.

“What we needed to do is look at our entire digital ecosystem and essentially reconstruct it from the ground up, because to continue the same analogy, we’re going to need essentially a skyscraper for the kind of traffic that we want to reach to,” Dávalos said.

The methods of teaching will stem from social media posts and online courses to Imprimis and the K-12 education program, he said.

In order to achieve this goal, the college needs to expand its media outreach, Regan said, to media forms such as social suites.

“So think about ‘The Michael Knowles Show’ or ‘The Brett Cooper Show,’” he said. “We’re going to start trying to develop some programming like that, that we consistently release with students and faculty.”

Having a platform that ties together all of the college’s resources will create a more immersive learning experience, Regan said. Providing multiple methods of learning from Imprimis to podcasts to online courses, the app will integrate it all onto a single digital platform, and make it easier for the college to design new material.

Because this project is still early in its development, there is not a definite timeline for completion. However, Murnen said the goal is to release the app by this coming fall.

A major motivating factor for the college to create this app is found in the mission of the school itself, Murnen said. The goal to make the college’s resources accessible and widespread dates back to its founding. 

“In our Articles of Association, the college is founded in the belief that ‘the diffusion of sound learning is essential to the perpetuity’ of civil and religious freedom and intelligent piety in America,” Murnen said. 

Dávalos said the most transformative things to his character have been his faith and education, and that’s what Hillsdale does for its students.

“What we want to do is take what happens here on campus and have it radiate across the country,” Davalos said.