Author: Paul Schantz

CSUN Director of Web & Technology Services, Student Affairs. husband, father, gamer, part time aviator, fitness enthusiast, Apple fan, and iguana wrangler.

Categories
Technology

Future Roadmap

Presenters:

  • Marty Johnson, Georgetown University
  • Brett Bendickson, Application Architect, University of Arizona

Brett Bendickson

  • UA public land grant institution
  • Founded in 1885
  • 40,072 students
  • UA implementation forces selection of user role via additions.
  • Lots of students want to access university gmail account through the mobile app, NOT the built-in email client (this is an interesting observation, in my opinion).
  • Usage by module:  map, transit, people, catalog
  • Usage by user:  87,191 sessions (about 3,000/day), 21,302 users (about 760/day)
  • In 2013 there were 18,600 iOS downloads.  Downloads spike for us in January and during orientation.
  • Android downloads are at about 22,000 and show a similar download pattern
  • AZ Mobile 3.2 current (Modo Labs 2.2); native tablet support; added library module
  • AZ Mobile 3.3 (Modo 2.3); upgrade to 2.3; add rec center module that was developed internally.  This will work with the resources module.
  • Portal: focus is currently on desktop view, but also working on a mobile view.  We’re doing a lot of custom development within Modo Labs, consuming PeopleSoft web services.
  • We’re excited about the direct messaging to the device, i.e. “you just got an ‘A’ in History”

QUESTION:  What software are you using in the rec center to feed the resources module?

BRETT:  I don’t know, but can find out for you.

Marty Johnson

  • Georgetown
  • GUMobile (Modo Labs)
  • We love additions!  3 campuses, 7 editions
  • NextGUTS (DoubleMap).
  • GAAP Weekend
  • We use a welcome screen by default
  • Our biggest challenge is getting accurate data from facilities and dining services.
  • LiveSafe (safe ride)
  • Laundry Alert (Quantifize)
  • NSO / OWN-IT (DoubleDutch)
  • Experiments:  CampusQuad; Usher (MicroStrategy); Radius Networks
  • Usher:  is a mobile “go card” that does multi-factor authentication (picture and QR code).  It can also be used to log into other applications.  We are hoping to add door opening functionality in the near future.
  • Working with Radius Networks to help students and parents find the admissions office from the parking lot.
  • Core Tenets:  our users are distracted, focused activities (short, sweet, and spontaneous), low barrier to entry (gradual engagement), personalized (location and time aware), adaptable.
  • Looking forward:  we believe we will have a portfolio of apps (safety, transportation, specific events, academic tasks, auth/identification); framework versus dedicated apps; app promotion

Question:  have you used Kurogo in a kiosk mode?

Both:  no.

Question:  Marty, who is Georgetown piloting this with?

Marty:  new students.

Marty:  We can imagine using iBeacons in the dorms for providing updates, i.e. water is out, emergency shelter in place notifications, etc.

Categories
Technology

Strategy Track 2 – Defining Success

Defining Success Panel:

  • Ted Erickson, University of Alberta
  • Ann Malavet, New York University
  • Bill Sivret, Tufts University

Ann Malavet

  • Who are we here for?  Internal & external users
  • User’s expectations:  immediate access to data, custom data/location-based data, same offerings as web site, always evolving
  • SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-based
  • What are our goals?  Real-time data to users that provide relevant info day-to-day, provide individualized content, authorized transactional activity, online and real-time comm between all university constituents (students, faculty and staff)
  • Data Planning:  Kurogo provides 99.9% of what we need, but our planning needs to identify what we actually need.  Accessed data needs to be consistent across the university; data owners need to be comfortable with the idea that their data will become much more readily, immediately, and widely available; unique identifiers need to be consistent so that data stores can be linked and made interoperable.
  • Some of our data providers were reticent to providing data to us, i.e. Aramark calorie counts
  • What are our priorities?  What will engage the users?  Can we efficiently achieve this with our resources?  What is our greatest need?  What can wait, what is needed now?
  • Gathering requirements:  money, time, resources
  • Strategy + Execution = Success
  • Tools for building & Maintaining:  your mobile app is fed by web services, modo labs, kurogo, and university staff
  • Strong Governance is required to make it work!  Ensure vested parties are engaged; major stakeholders who commit resources would ideally be part of a mobile steering committee; utilize existing web portal governance model

Bill Sivret

  • About 10,000
  • Tufts launched mobile app in 2011 (custom PHP app)
  • Launched Kurogo in 2013
  • We use Tableau (a Business Intelligence tool) to create dashboards and ad-hoc reports.  It’s connected to several data sources, including our data warehouse and Google Analytics
  • Demo of Tableau dashboard

Ted Erickson

  • 39,000 students, intensive research university in Canada
  • Goal:  to become one of the best examples of a post-secondary digital learning environment enabled by our web, mobile, social networks and IT systems capabilities.  1) Champion interdisciplinary knowledge sharing, 2) Empower student and staff innovation, 3) Commit to audience-centric design, 4) Build for the mobile, connected community
  • Digital Product and Service Catalogue:  business and strategy, performance and optimization, product management, web, mobile, digital learning
  • We do not use a cost-recovery model.
  • Use of the word “product” is not an accident.  We manage our products through the entire life cycle.
  • Digital Strategy – our group is apart from MarCom and IT.  Digital strategy is convergence of creativity, technology and media.  It transforms business and marketing strategy.
  • Success Metrics:  web, mobile, learning
  • The future

QUESTION for Bill:  what data sources are you using besides GA within Tableau for your dashboards?  Do you use Tableau for real-time data analysis?  Did you consider any other tools besides Tableau like Plot.ly?

Bill:  at this time, we only use GA, and it does do real-time analysis.  We did not consider any additional tools because we were already using it for our data warehouse.

 

Categories
Technology

Strategy Track 1 – Mobile Strategy

Mobile Strategy Panel:

  • August Alfonso, CIO, Del Mar College
  • Susan Kellogg, AVP & Deputy CIO, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
  • Santhana Naidu, Indiana State University

Susan Kellogg

  • First public institution
  • 29,000 students
  • $2.7 billion annual operating budget
  • $792.7 million total research funding for FY2014
  • What was needed in a mobile app
  • Student-led mobile app was led by:  Nikita Shamdasani, Diana Dayal, Matt Leming
  • Tech landscape:  highly decentralized funding environment, large MarCom and IT environments, also decentralized; WordPress CMS, 10,000 sites; Kurogo for centralized mobile app; Use of Adobe DPS is growing; 10 legacy mobile apps
  • We are looking at partnerships, especially with students, MarCom
  • Operational monitoring:  watch what’s happening and pull content that is not being used.  Update with seasonal information.
  • I’m a waterfall person, but I can see that agile is going to be the way forward (and I’m not totally comfortable with this!)

Santhana Naidu

  • Doctoral/Research in Terre Haute, IN
  • 13,200 students
  • First public university in IN to require a laptop
  • Mobile initiative started in 2010; native apps by OIT & mobile web by MarCom
  • Went back to the drawing board in Fall 2011; MarCom and OIT partnership with student feedback; Modo relationship
  • ISU Mobile:  over 25K downloads in 3 years
  • Popular modules:  courses, dining, map, email, directory
  • Primarily a marketing tool
  • OIT and MarCom partnership:  we meet quarterly to review analytics.
  • Governance is centralized and involves purchasing department
  • Lessons learned:  adoption of a user-centered design cycle; CMO vs. CIO partnership; finding the right mobile partner
  • Future:  mobile ubiquity and managing student expectations:  student services; RAVE guardian; audience segmentation; mobile ID/Digital wallet; geo-location based services; push messages; private app store

August Alfonso

  • Access to Excellence is the theme for Del Mar’s mobile strategy
  • Inspirations:  “we shutdown when we step into colleges or universities…we are fully well connected anywhere else” and “you all need to get your act together so we can get to what we need, when we want to, with our own devices”
  • BYOD Mobile Strategy:  VikingNet BYOD (4 devices per); Canvas – 100%  of credit/non-credit courses; Ask-The-Viking 24/7 online help; lecture capture within the LMS; Online Faculty Evaluation by Students; NEW mobile engine VikingGo
  • Del Mar MUST excel in online and mobile:  “you can carry Del Mar wherever you go”
  • VikingGo Mobile App:  Full Modolabs functionality; RAVE Alert; RAVE Guardian; Ask-the-Viking; Canvas LMS, et. al; alumni; Board meeting module; links to important resources

Panel Discussion

Susan:  how were mobile decisions made?  Who prioritized things?

August:  we had a mobile app we were about 11 months into when we decided to go to Modo.  Users were demanding more features than my staff could deliver using the existing solution.  We used analytics and asked students what they wanted.  We also asked our staff the same questions.

Santhana:  we have quarterly meetings with campus principals where we discuss prioritization of what needs to be done.   Items that affect student status are a high priority.

Susan:  speed is a challenge, and we need a way to maintain the student’s voice in all this.  We have a lot of customers who say that they’re boring, but important, and that leads to some interesting discussions about home page real estate.

Susan:  do you have plans to have multiple groups to maintain your content?  How do you plan to manage that?

August:  we look at the total student experience.  The heaviest investment is the mobile engine itself, so that decision has be gotten right the first time.

Santhana:  we rely on Modo to provide an extra hand in development when we don’t have the bandwidth to handle all the work.

Susan:  multi-tenant functionality will be important for us, and identifying the stewards of that associated content is probably even more important (content “ownership” can be challenging).

Santhana:  use of publisher in a multi-tenant

QUESTION:  How do you use analytics in your decision-making?

Susan:  we’re not doing much with performance right now.

August:  we’ve used analytics to keep an eye on our peak times.

Santhana:  we use Google Analytics

QUESTION:  How do you control who can create and manage an application?  What’s the life cycle for these apps, how do you manage it?

August:  IT/MarCom have to work closely to manage this.  Objectives need to be clearly identified before resources can be committed to a project.

Susan:  change in upper management at our university means that we don’t have a lot of entrenched views.  This has enabled us to “cheat a little bit” and move forward faster than we might have been able to in the past.

Categories
Technology

3 Minutes of Fame Presentations

Presenters:  representatives from participating Kurogo Institutions (each listed below)

This section of the conference was to provide participating institutions a platform for talking about what they’re doing.

Matt Willmore from Notre Dame

  • Launched with 15 modules in April of 2014
  • 3 new ones:  transit, campus IT, mobile printing
  • 22,000 downloads
  • Promoted at orientation
  • Evolving maps:  custom map icons, which came from Indiana State University (like ATMs)
  • Google Analytics
  • Student developers built the weather web cams and transit modules
  • Shuttle schedule
  • Popular features:  dining, map, athletics, webcams, photos.
  • Platforms:  iOS/Android native; mobile web; mobile tablet; desktop
  • What’s next?  Sakai

Paul Chenowith from Belmont University

 

  • Liberal arts institution in Nashville, TN
  • 7,200 students, music, health science, law school, and more
  • We’ve launched 2 apps in the last few months:  Modo for external, non-authenticated use
  • Tours and emergency notifications were big features for us, we also use convocations; myBelmont is a link to our authenticated services.
  • The directory is one our most-used features
  • Popular features:  Directory, Convo Events, Library, Course Search, myBelmont
  • Platforms:  iPhone native, Android native
  • What’s next?  Dining services (Sodhexo, we hope to do 2 upgrades per year, policies and procedures for management of overwhelming number of requests for new functionality)

Dan Liggett from CSU East Bay

 

  • Released in March 2015
  • What’s next:  grades (which we think will be our “killer app”), facilities, transit
  • Platforms:  mobile web, mobile web tablet, desktop

Kathryn Sharron from CSUN

 

  • Reputation and Visibility initiative just launched; new logo
  • About 58,000 students
  • Accessibility very important for us
  • Launched in August 2013 with 5 modules including enrollment
  • SoMe, photos, tour, additions feature for faculty/staff view, indoor maps, transit
  • Enrollment in classes is most popular module, and is easier to use than our PeopleSoft portal.
  • We allow students to pay, via a custom PeopleSoft web service to CashNet (which itself provides a mobile responsive view)
  • Top 4:  enroll in classes, map, dining

David from Colgate

 

  • GPS bus system, which we named “Colgate Cruiser” and worked with company called DoubleMap
  • Publisher is very popular (i.e. SPW or Spring Party Weekend, 13 days of Green were new modules which made quick updates by students very easy)
  • We have portal sign-on for our Banner system
  • Popular:  Cruiser, SPW, 13 days of green, courses, dining
  • Platforms:  iPhone native, Android native, mobile web, desktop
  • What’s next?  beefing up the infrastructure to handle bursts of heavy traffic.

Dan from Dallas County Community College District

  • About 80,000 students
  • We used to use Blackboard, which had a number of limitations that caused us to reevaluate our mobile platform choice
  • We had four IT people who Modo Labs basically spoon-fed us during the implementation
  • Most of the challenges were around how we would modify the app to support 7 different campuses (i.e. branding)
  • Student involvement has been a great experience for us
  • Popular:  Courses, Maps, eCampus, eConnect, myPortal
  • Platforms

Julie from Fitchburg State University

    • We’re located in Massachusetts
    • Been using for about 3 years, and it’s a great tool to aggregate information from many different sources (we don’t have a portal)
    • Adding more features as they become available.  Most recent one is courses, which is integrated with Blackboard.  we launched this last week.
    • What’s New:  laundry!  Integrating with LaundryView feed.  Student can select laundry facilities; it shows machine availability and cycle it’s on.
    • Popular:  Shuttles, admissions, athletics, tour, dining
    • Platforms:  Mobile web, mobile web tablet, desktop

Jeff Dillon from CSU Sacramento State

  • Using since 2012 (originally the free framework)
  • 28,000 total students
  • We have registrar module, which is by far the most-used module
  • 10,000 downloads total, 3,000 in first week; 75% iOS, 25% Android
  • Directory is very popular
  • We’re using Blackboard mobile learn
  • Dining / athletics are just links to mobile-aware sites
  • We’re still working on the governance
  • The registrar told us that our students really like the ability to see where the class is
  • We expected support issues with performance, but it worked out
  • Popular:  registrar, calendar, social, directory, campus map
  • Platforms:  iPhone native, Android native, mobile web
  • What’s next:  parking availability, role-based content, CashNet payment integration

Michelle from West Chester, Pennsylvania

    • 16,000 students, new branch campus in Philadelphia
    • Recently made our web site responsive
    • About 1,000 views / day
    • Integrating D2L (Desire to Learn) module, 25Live calendar module
    • Popular:  email, buses, directory, academic calendar, news
    • Platforms:  iOS, Android, mobile web, mobile web tablet, desktop
    • What’s next:  RSS feed integration

 

 

Bob from Modo Labs, schools not represented at the conference

      • New tools from Modo coming soon:  customer portal UI, forums, FAQs
      • College of William and Mary:  springboards
      • Harvard Shoestring Strategies:  financial literacy module.  It’s all put together with Publisher.
      • Villanova School of Business:  publisher-based application with templates and push notifications.
      • Barnard College:  publisher
      • Emerson College:  uses portlets as home screen, which allows them to completely customize the view; they also use resource availability module to show their library’s computer lab availability.
      • Masdar Institute:  UAE-based college, uses facilities module.  It uses authentication to present personalized information.
      • Rhode Island School of Design:  one of the top design schools in the country.  They independently theme every single thing they do, which reflects the flexibility of the Kurogo platform.
      • Sacramento State:  launching 2.3 soon, with favoriting feature and maps.

 

 

Categories
Technology

What’s the Point?

Presenters:

  • Melissa Harts, Dean of Institutional Technology, Pasco-Hernando State College
  • Mark Tennyson is PHSC project lead

Resources:

PHSC is new to mobile, we launched last August, started collecting data in October.  We have five campuses with about 16,000 students.  We are a community college system in Florida, and we recently started offering Baccalaureate degrees.  Mobile has helped transform our processes.  Our online program is growing at a double-digit rate, with students in every state in the United States.

Transformation

  • How do we use the mobile app to create a sense of community in this changing environment?
  • CHANGES:  community > State college; adding bachelor’s degrees; new campus; changing deans of institutional tech (me!); new systems app dev; upcoming retirement of president; increase of online courses

Why Mobile?  Why modo?

  • Two-pronged decision:  going mobile was partly “pre-decided” by a management committee.
  • Our matrix selection criteria:  met needs of focus group, admin panel, analytics to measure success, interoperable with current systems, admin portal with different permission roles, end-user support, mobile web included, and of course price.
  • There was always a certain amount of doubt in my mind about whether they would be able to support our needs.
  • 80% of colleges and university respondents use or are planning to use mobile apps for teaching.

Vision:  Initial Goals

  • One dimensional goal:  build a mobile app!

Vision:  Current

  • Functional on all devices
  • Wanted to reflect our transformation from 2 to 4 year college and growth, community (HS to alumni), excellence, campus safety, and more.

Challenges

  • Infrastructure
  • Resources:  all hands on deck!
  • Timing:  this growth phase of our campuses was the best time for us do this.
  • Awareness:  students couldn’t find an app for our campus (because it didn’t exist!)
  • Perception:

Mobile app project

  • Project schedule:  rapid development of 16-17 weeks
  • Implementation Strategy (pilot release, refinements)
  • Official launch was August 2014.  We embedded the launch into existing communication channels, NOT a standalone app.
  • Took feedback from a variety of channels, including a module and surveys.

Feedback:  What’s the Point?

  • One student’s feedback asked this question
  • App has to engage the student

Data Drill Down:  Measuring Success

  • Users:  Accessed by 20% of core user community
  • Top Modules:  mail, cal, eLearning, Directory, Courses, News
  • Keyword searches:  WISE (SIS), myPHSC (Canvas/LMS); people, events, academic dates, courses; financial related queries; graduation, grades
  • Average Time Users Stay:  full college web site:  4:00 minutes; mobile site:  2:05 minutes

Where do we go from here?

  • Integration of SIS
  • Think of new ways to engage our students
  • Think of new ways to engage our staff, faculty, alumni, applicants, 1st time students
  • Create a community of Learners
  • Show this is a valuable tool to strengthen the community

Looking Forward:  Concerns

  • Keep  users interested
  • Keep pace with needs
  • Awareness of college needs
  • Leadership:  support and keep the mobile app viable
  • New IT staffing needs

Conclusion

  • How do we use the mobile app to create a sense of community in this changing environment?
  • Embrace transformation
  • Learn from your community
  • Immerse yourself into their business
  • Transform your mindset and think about their role and needs
  • Be willing to accept criticism and grow from it
  • Develop a strategy that is inclusive of a NEEDS assessment, not a WANTS assessment