Community Financial Aid Shopping Sheet Template
Update: This project has been discontinued. However, don’t worry! The University of California, Santa Barbara has released a similar template.
Recently I’ve been working on an open-source template for the Financial Aid Shopping Sheet.
Background
Let me give you a little background:
On July 24, 2012, the Obama administration introduced the Shopping Sheet, a tool to help students better understand and compare the costs of attending college. U.S. Secretary of Education Duncan followed this announcement with an open letter urging all higher education institutions to adopt the new Shopping Sheet.
On September 28, 2012, the Department of Education provided a HTML template that could be used by institutions to display the Shopping Sheet on their website.
Why Create a New Template?
Although the Department of Education already provides a viable HTML Shopping Sheet template, the Community Template builds and improves upon this template, including:
- Separating CSS and HTML for better separation of concerns
- Reducing the overall size of the HTML markup for improved performance and easier modifiability
- Reducing the use of images for improved performance and increased control of content through markup and styling
- Reducing the file size of the images for increased performance
- Providing customization instructions for easier template customization
- Adding a “Download XML” modal dialog for better integration of that feature within the interface
Furthermore, the repository itself also provides an open forum for people to suggest continued improvements to the template and also allows developers to further extend the template.
Please help me continue to improve the template!