According to the “Webometrics Ranking of World University,” announced by Spanish National Research Council in Jan. 2010, TKU has been ranked as No. 483 among 18,000 higher education institutions worldwide, No. 50 in Asia, and No. 11 in Taiwan. We are not only the No. 1 among the private universities in Taiwan continuously for many years, but also the only private university in Taiwan ranked above No. 500 in the world.

“Webometrics Ranking of World University” is published twice a year. Apart from evaluating teaching faculty and journal paper publication, the other four indicators are Web Size, Visibility, Rich Files, and Scholar, that is, the number of papers and citations in Google Scholar.

In the indicator of “Web Size,” our ranking drops to No. 291 from No. 184 last year, and “Visibility” to No. 849 from No. 363. As for the indicator of “Rich Files,” the ranking improves from No. 706 last year to No. 407, and “Scholar” from No. 423 to No. 375. Dr. Chen Kan-nan, Vice President for Academic Affairs, indicated that the teaching evaluation last year indirectly speed up the information updating process of the school. Hence, all units still need to update the files on the website actively and quickly. Moreover, since the using rate of Teaching Resource Platform is not very high, he suggested teachers to upload the course information in time to raise the ranking.

Compared with other indicators, TKU’s ranking of “Visibility” goes backward the most this year. Dr. Chen commented on this problem, “The first important thing is to increase the range of visibility.” Moreover, the layout of TKU’s web pages is less creative and vivid than that of other schools, and the update of English web pages is also not quick enough. “English web pages and Chinese web pages need to be updated at the same time,” Dr. Chen said. In addition, many departments do not update their websites as soon as possible for a lot of their information was posted before Chinese New Year Holiday. Dr. Chen expressed that the regression of the ranking of “Visibility” is a serious warning for us. There are many places that we have to improve and he appealed to all the administrative and teaching units to update the information promptly. ( ~Shu-chun Yen )