Mobilizing Higher Education

Colleges and universities provide students with the tools they need to become productive, engaged citizens. Today, that means integrating the latest technology and making use of advancements in digital communication and social media. Higher education institutions need to have a mobile strategy in place to stay at the top of the class.

What Does Your App Need?

The most advanced colleges and universities have started to go beyond the basic student and faculty apps and are building unique functionality for parents, alumni, and prospective students. It won’t be long before optimized apps for each user group will become an expectation.

What will some of these user groups want from their mobile applications?

• Today’s college students want an app to check class schedules, see grades, and access office hour information. Students need campus maps, tools to find the closest campus shuttles, and even access to the dining hall menu. To take advantage of their adoption of social media, colleges should consider integrating Twitter and Facebook feeds to help students connect with each other. Schools can also use notifications to alert students of class cancellations, weather alerts, or campus emergencies.
• Campus staff and faculty want applications that allow them to track and monitor assignments, send out important alerts to their entire class with a single message, and keep them up-to-date on departmental information.
• Parents want an app to check their children’s tuition fees, grades, and the account balances on their student debit cards. They want access to campus news and security alerts. Colleges can even mobilize their parent forums so that busy moms and dads can interact via smartphone.
• Alumni want to use a mobile app to stay connected with their peers through social networks, track campus news and events, enable job and networking opportunities, and even donate money to their alma mater with a simple click of a button.
• For prospective students, mobile applications provide an augmented sense of community and can provide greater insight during a campus tour and throughout the admissions process. Colleges can integrate GPS to enable a virtual tour, include a photo gallery of campus hot spots, and keep a calendar with notifications to make sure that applicants have all of the information and important dates they need at their fingertips.

How do you Build it?

There are a few solutions on the market for colleges that want to go mobile, but not every solution offers the same product. If an app doesn’t give students the information they need and offer an interesting and intuitive UI, they aren’t going to waste their time using it. This means you need to choose a solution that will give you control when building your application and allow you to design a fully-customized, cross-device app that meets the specific needs of your individual university. The solution should also enable you to be responsive to the changing needs of your students and faculty in real time.

Indiana State University, for example, recently built “ISU Mobile,” an app that mobilizes information their students need. Because they used a development platform that allows trained users to easily make updates with minimal regression testing and no code generation, they can listen to feedback and respond with additional features.

 

 

Building mobile apps for your community will help you take your institution into the next era of digital communication.

Leave a comment to tell us about mobile apps that are benefiting their higher education community!