APS7: Mobile Applications for Higher Education

Tom Barker: I'm Tom Barker. This is Curtis McCartney. We've been working at NKU for the last year on mobile development.

Curtis McCartney: We've been working at NKU for the past four years or so each on web applications--csharp.net, Java, PHP, and so on. We do have development experience. We just had no experience in the particular platform we chose to go with.

[Laughter]

Tom Barker: That was really our decision, OK? We were--

Curtis McCartney: So that was a bit of an issue.

Tom Barker: --just thrust into that.

Curtis McCartney: So, to recap, we're going to talk about smart phone ecology, a little bit of an introduction to why we went into the particular platform we chose to go into, a little bit of history of the development that we did, and an overview of the actual app that our team in particular came out with, and then another introduction of another app that student workers solely did, along with a demonstration of that, too.

Tom Barker: OK. So how many smart phones are on college campuses? Two recent studies by Boise State University and University of Colorado have found that about 50% of college students are carrying smart phones with them these days.

The University of Colorado study. And bear in mind both of these studies were earlier this year. The University of Colorado study was in April of this year. They found that at university campuses, iPhones represent about 40% of smart phones, followed by BlackBerry and Android at 26% and 22% apiece. So what that meant for our university, we've got about 16,000 students, and so we had about 3,200 people carrying around iPhones.

Now, in terms of what kind of smart phones will students be carrying in the future, the study didn't cover that, but if you look at national growth trends, you see that while in June this year iPhones accounted for 28% of the U.S. smart phone market, Android accounted for about 13% of the smart phone market.

However, as you can see by this graph here where the black line is iPhone's recent sales and the green line is Android's recent sales, sometime around last Christmas iPhone sales started taking a steady dip, going from 34% down to the present 23% of recent sales, whereas Androids took a sharp rise, going from 6% up to 27% of recent sales. If these growth trends continue, Androids are expected to overtake the mobile market place by around 2014.

They were also surveyed what is the next likely smart phone to be used, and iPhone users seem to be overwhelmingly happy with their iPhone. Eighty-nine percent said they would get another iPhone after this one. Android owners were also very happy with their devices. Seventy-one percent said they would stay with Android; 21% said they would move to an iPhone next. BlackBerry users, not as happy. Fifty percent of them said they would move to either Android or iPhone.

Regardless of whether it's the iPhone or the Android, though, we feel that if you're going to develop a mobile app as a native app rather than a mobile web, you need to develop for both Android and iPhone.

Curtis McCartney: So, deciding on which platform we're going to start developing for, we have a very small team of developers in our group. It's pretty much just us. There is another sister organization, IMI, Infrastructure Management Institute, who utilizes student workers to the full capacity..

Tom Barker: They've had their student workers do a lot of the heavy lifting.

Curtis McCartney: Yeah. And they have this educational outreach program that works in collaboration with businesses. What are the businesses interested in, they get the student workers working on that, and thus, student workers are more prepared to go into the business.

So, back when we were deciding to get into development for devices in the first place, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and the iPhone were the three biggest out there.

As you saw from the previous graph, around, I guess, Quarter 2 '09, Android was kind of a blip on the horizon but we knew it was coming. But as far as devoting all your developers to what you're going to work on, do you work on the thing that might be great, or the thing at the point, which was iPhone, that looked very promising for development? So the aspect of 'what was the future growth' came into play a lot.

Also...let's see. The distribution mechanism, the iTunes, students. We're targeting students, obviously. The students we surveyed were particularly interested in iPhone as opposed to BlackBerry or one of those mobile, and so were we. That came into play a lot. But we ended up deciding on the iPhone platform.

We had to decide, after we had decided on the platform, how we were going to go about building our application.

Initially, we were confused as to whether we were going to start at it right off the get-go. Looking at all the features and plugging away at one application, we decided on, instead, developing each function of the application separately because we had a lot of different applications coming down the pipeline that we were going to utilize the same kind of feature, same functionality.

So instead of having one project, which was our application at the time, we developed it independently as a set of modules that we would then put together for the core application.

This helped out with versioning. We didn't step on each other's toes so much. And also, keeping the documentation for the functions together, it worked out pretty well. It's more like using building blocks to pull the thing together, which was pretty nice.

So we used student workers, NKU. I don't know how many of you use student workers very often. Many? At all? It works out very well as far as we have experienced.

Tom Barker: They get a lot of real-world experience.

Curtis McCartney: Yeah. And we don't have a problem finding the students who are capable of doing the work that we demand of them. They're very dedicated. And we got a lot of interest with this iPhone development that we had in the pipeline.

Tom Barker: We just recently had a course in our university, and I don't know how many of your universities are doing similar things. We had a course in iPhone development, and after this course was over, we were like just beating students away with a stick that wanted to work on these projects with us.

Curtis McCartney: Yeah. So as far as IMI goes, they have the majority of the student workers. We get like one at a time. They develop both for iPhone and Android over there. We do mainly iPhone work.

So, we have so far put together 14 applications that are available, complete. And student workers have done one of them, which is the flash card app tentatively named the Flash Card. It's not complete yet, but we're going to demonstrate that later.

Tom Barker: Right. Well, the student workers who've helped on all of the applications, they've done one solely on the ring ray. From things like...there's a fire department app for San Ramon Fire Department, and Alerts4me sends out push notifications depending on the kind of service you subscribe to.

So, a little bit about our flagship app, iNKU. iNKU was initially released in 2009. It's free in the app store. As we mentioned earlier, we decided to go with iPhone not only because at the time the iPhone was more appealing to our students but also because of the availability of iPod touch, which had app interoperability with the iPhone.

And what we were trying to do is port the most-used functionality from our website to the native app. There is the argument of going native app or mobile web app. Our leadership decided to go with native app development, I think more in terms of trying to develop some in-house expertise in mobile app development to use with some of our other community outreach programs.

The first version of iNKU was pretty simple. It was released more as a proof of concept than anything else. It was released in Spring 2009, really just had four features: had a glossary of NKU terms for incoming students, had a sing-along fight song with a little bouncing ball that bounces from word to word, had an NKU-themed trivia game, and the campus map with GPS location.

Unfortunately, we weren't able to use Google Maps. I was listening to a talk yesterday and somebody asked, "Is anybody doing their own campus map?" and I just kind of hid down in my chair.

Our campus is always under construction, so if you look at the Google Map of our campus right now we've got at least two buildings that just aren't even there. So we can't have a pin sticking on a construction crater saying, "Oh, this is your science building. This is where your classes are going to be." So we had to go with our own thing.

Curtis McCartney: Yeah, and I think at the time of this release actually through development the map on Google Maps. It was like five years out of date.

Tom Barker: Yeah. It was a little bit terrible.

So, about the time of last year's HighEdWeb, Curtis and I got put on this project. And this is what it looked like then. And then the following March, we gave it a complete cosmetic face lift and we added a bunch of new features: searchable campus directory, our students could do their online student evaluations from the iPhone, a GPA calculator, links to the athletics mobile page, and the university calendar.

We aggregated all of the RSS feeds from all of the various departments from school. And we have two streaming radio stations: our WNKU, which is our campus radio station, and we have a student-run station, Norse Code Radio, that plays out of the app.

And this was, like I say, really the first time we tried to make it actually useful as opposed to just a toy, really. And this was a combination of mobile web and native app.

We had two little small releases fixing bugs, things like that, and about a month after the March release we pushed out another release in April where we had completed some of the features we've had in the pipeline up to that point.

So one feature was the bus schedule. Transit Authority of Northern Kentucky has all of the bus stops, live updated arrival times, a little counter that counts down as to when the next bus ride will be, drops all of the bus stops on a pin with your current GPS location so you can see which bus stop is closest to you from where you're standing at the moment.

We got into our student information system--it's an SAP portal--to pull out the student course schedules, so the student can log in through an authenticated portal and look at their class schedule for that semester rather than native app.

And then we also added in our course catalog. And then the most recent version we released about two months ago added iPad support, making it a universal IOS app. And we added some more functionality from the SAP portal: the grades. Now the students can log in and view their grades for the last few semesters. And you can also see what their average was for that semester, what their average was for the previous college career at that point, how many quality hours they have earned, that kind of thing.

In terms of features that we used, we started tracking individual feature use in the most recent version. And this is about--it's the time that I took this slide. That was about...I don't know, three or four weeks' worth of data in there. And you can see that the student class schedule was getting hit really, really heavily.

Now we released this version of the app right before the beginning of the semester. So, clearly, all of our users were, as they were trying to get used to the new semester, trying to, "What class am I going to next?" They would whip out their mobile device and check out their schedule.

Of course, catalog got quite a few uses. Of course, that was also during the drop/add portion of the semester right toward the beginning. Some students were looking at their grades, although we expect that feature to really spike up toward the end of the semester when students have got a full grading cycle they can start looking at their grades at the end of this semester.

Up until Version 2.4, we used Flurry Analytics. We took it out in 2.4 because Flurry pissed off Steve Jobs and he was kind of getting back at them.

The top line--you can't really see the colors on this very well, unfortunately--shows the number of users that are using it at least once or twice a day. And currently we've got about just a little under 300 users who use it every single day at least once or twice. Users who are using the device three to five times a day are in the mid...around 170s. We have some users that use it 69 times a day just below a hundred.

In terms of usage by month, we inserted Flurry in August of 2009 and usage steadily grew until the end of the Spring semester in April 2010. Then we see a dip over the summer; nobody's at school, nobody cares about school. But then we started spiking back up again when we started back to school.

In terms of average session length--how long do people stay in our app--right at the beginning people were spending about 18 to 19 minutes in the app. And at the time, all that was really in the app was the fight song, the glossary, and the trivia game. And so we figured the average user was getting on and looking through all of that information and then just seeing what was there, realizing that there wasn't much, and then usage dropped way off again right after that.

And then we kind of started steadily growing again after we released some new features in March and April, and then where we're at right now is about an average of 12 minutes per user.

What devices is iNKU on? We're finding that two-thirds of the devices that we're on are iPhones. About a third are iPod touches. We've got a very small percentage of iPad, but then bear in mind that this was not a universal app during this feature. So if you don't have an iPad version of your app and you're just using the iPod version, it just expands the same view and it looks like crap. So, I mean, I'm not surprised that we don't have statistics on this since we've become a universal app, but I expect that figure would be a little bit larger.

So, what's next for iNKU? Where are we going with all this?

Well, we have some social media integration features that we've been developing, Facebook and Twitter. We have a campus photo gallery that we're putting in the device, a virtual campus tour that is going in. We plan further ASP integration so we can show the current students' registration status--do they have any holds or not, do they have any tuition due, who was their current adviser and how do they get in touch with that person.

So I think at this point we're going to show you what iNKU looks like. We had intended to do this with actual iPhones and iPads in the document projector, but that's just not working out for us today. So if you'd like to...

Curtis McCartney: Yeah.

Tom Barker: So we're stuck using the iPhone simulator.

Curtis McCartney: So our application has 15 different features available, 10 of which are native features.

Tom Barker: Oh. You're going to have to log on.

Curtis McCartney: I'm sorry.

Tom Barker: We rebooted the machine. We're going to have to log on before we can show anything on web accessibility. Sorry, it's an Aruba thing.

Curtis McCartney: So, 10 of the features are native functionality features, five of which are still using web applications that we developed, PHP and...

Tom Barker: Oh, my God.

Curtis McCartney: ...C#, other technologies. Three of the features that are native require authentication, and I guess that's one of the downsides of us having built them as individual modules--

Tom Barker: I guess I've already done that.

Curtis McCartney: --because they each independently require authentication. In the future we're planning on having a single sign-on kind of method for them.

So, two of which, so far, the MyGrades and MyClasses, use SAP integration. So it connects via SOAP service to the SAP database. This is the campus directory, NKU Find-It. In order to search for a student, you have to log in. So I'm not going to show student information, but, I mean, it just pulls up the...

I see the listing of the faculty, and you can call them or email them from the phone from the interface. These require AD authentication, so...oops. Not my credentials. We log in.

It allows the student to view their grades from MyGrades, so they select a semester term and program type, and then they're able to view detailed grade information based on the SAP values.

So they have cumulative information and then information based on each course they're taking like Grade Quality Points, so on and so forth. So, we have...

We're planning future SAP integration, like we said. SAPs are particular live back-end for student information now.

They can also view their class schedule. Oops. So they select a course, they can see what type of course it is, who's teaching it, when, where, how many credits it's worth. This in particular is not a full-credit course. So, let's hit it.

So the tank bus application, like you were saying, they can see the different routes that the bus takes, how much time it's going to be until the bus arrives to that route. So this is very useful for students. They can see where corresponding to their current location they are.

Tom Barker: Can we try--

Curtis McCartney: We have to go pretty far north to see where we are right now.

[Laughter]

Tom Barker: Right.

Curtis McCartney: Yeah, I was trying to pinch.

Tom Barker: Yeah.

Curtis McCartney: And, let's see... RSS feeds... It aggregates feeds. They can favorite the feed. It shows the feed, how many feeds you haven't read, how many feeds you favorited. So it's kind of cool.

And this is another issue. I don't know if any of you have gotten into development for iPhone or any other mobile platform, but as far as making updates, we use PHP back-end to send into phone things that we need to update regularly so we don't have to deal with the hassle of sending in a totally new version with everything on the phone. So that list of feeds was being sent to it from PHP service.

So we also have streaming radio available. This is the iPhone simulator so it doesn't show the volume control and has other features, but they can play live radio while they use a phone. We have two different radio stations that we have built in for streaming radio. Aside from that...

Tom Barker: Sparkle version. Yeah.

Curtis McCartney: Yeah. We have the fight song. Yeah, you click on it.

Tom Barker: Yeah.

Curtis McCartney: I guess you won't be able to hear it. If you want to sing along, you're more than welcome to, though.

Tom Barker: Just kind of make up your own tune there.

Curtis McCartney: Some campus trivia. And the map. OK. So that's basically how iNKU is right now.

We also have, like I was saying, a flash card application in development, solely made by student workers as part of the educational outreach program that we have.

Tom Barker: We had a faculty member suggest this project to us.

Curtis McCartney: Yeah.

Tom Barker: Part of the requirement was that faculty members only can log on to the system. They can create their own decks of cards and their own custom cards.

Curtis McCartney: And that the cards would be available as decks to the students regardless of if they have a connection to the application at the time. So it stores the decks on...

Tom Barker: On the phone.

Curtis McCartney: ...the device, yeah. So this is built for Android and for iPhone. And as Tom explained, he is logged in as a faculty member and he's in the process of adding, modifying decks.

Tom Barker: So let's say I want to create a deck for an art class. I'm going to add a new deck here. Title...and course...and topic. And then save that. And then we can go in and add cards.

OK. So it starts with--the default template for the card is just text in the front, text in the back. We can change the template to have a card with no text and one image on the front and then card with text and one image on the back, and make those my default, and save that. Select the location of my image for the front and the back...and then type in text for the card.

OK, so maybe my spelling's not that great. Maybe it's still not great. Who cares?

So I'm going to save that. And then if I want to review cards that I've built already, I can click on the card and it will show me the front and back. And then I can continue doing this until I have a bunch of cards and a complete deck.

On the device, the student will log on to the app and can look at the current decks. Let's search by course. HighEdWeb. And here's the deck. I guess we want to download the deck. And then we can view the deck, view the flash cards, and we can look from one card to the next. Click it to view the back, see whatever the answer is.

If we've already learned a particular card, we don't want to see that anymore. We can hide the card. That won't show up any longer. If we want to unhide the cards, we can view the flash cards again...having clicked--you see what I did there, right? I clicked to show the hidden cards. View the flash cards...and come to the card that was hidden, unhide it, and then reset the deck. And then when I'm all finished, we can get rid of the deck entirely.

So that's the flash card app. And I think that's everything we've got.

Do you have any questions? Yes.

Audience 1: [27:27 Unintelligible]

Tom Barker: No. No, we haven't. We haven't done that at all. That's not anything that's been addressed at our level. Our leadership really believes in mobile apps just as a teaching tool, a teaching aid. Things like iNKU, I don't know that they've done a cost assessment on that. If they have, they haven't shared that with me.

But my understanding is that they're just trying to develop some in-house expertise in the development end of things so that we can develop some of these teaching aids that are being submitted to us from faculty and students on campus.

Curtis McCartney: Right. And not just faculty and students. We actually have way more applications coming down the pipe from outside corporations than we can handle. I think that might be another reason that he wants us to be able to help the students coming in to us from the education outreach and through IMI in order to actually build these applications.

Tom Barker: Yes.

Audience 2: [28:43 Unintelligible]

Tom Barker: There is no cost at all. These are all free to download and free to use.

Yes.

Audience 3: Do you guys use any framework?

Tom Barker: Just Cocoa Touch. We're not using any framework on the back-end. Like I said, this is completely student-developed. So I don't believe that they used any framework like Code Ignitor or.

Curtis McCartney: They also didn't use a pre-built CMS. They were thinking about using Drupal but decided to build their own.

Tom Barker: Yes.

Audience 4: [29:24 Unintelligible]

Curtis McCartney: Yes.

Tom Barker: Yes. Yes. They would be responsible for developing the decks in their entirety.

Audience 4: [29:35 Unintelligible]

Tom Barker: No, no. They can log on to this portal. It filters based on your AD group, and so the faculty and staff can log on and create decks and edit decks.

Yes.

Audience 5: [29:55 Unintelligible]

Tom Barker: It logs on through LDAP authentication.

Yes. Yes.

Audience 6: [30:11 Unintelligible]

Tom Barker: The feedback that we've gotten has been pretty positive, particularly with the later versions of the app.

Again, that's not something that we've heard a lot from in our role. Our team leaders are more interfacing with the students and Marketing Communications interfaces with the student body more on the app level than we do.

Yes.

Audience 7: You've mentioned something about struggles in RSS. Is that like a centralized thing? How many services do you have?

Curtis McCartney: Well, let's see. The different areas around campus have their own RSS feeds. So we have a list.

Tom Barker: Yeah.

Curtis McCartney: Yeah, centralized, just sending it from a PHP page of the list of RSS feeds, and then it goes, grabs each of those feeds when you click it. Yeah.

Audience 7: [31:11 Unintelligible]

Tom Barker: I'm sorry?

Audience 7: [31:17 Unintelligible]

Tom Barker: The services that feed into the iNKU device?

Audience 7: Right.

Tom Barker: Yeah. There are feeds that feed the information from SAP, and that's being fed from our SAP servers. Let's see... There is the feed for the campus directory that's being fed through an app server that we have set up.

Audience 7: Like your web services, would those go out to all the individual servers or would they continue a server which is pulling all these...?

Tom Barker: Yeah. Well, they're all running off of our app server. So, yeah.

Audience 7: [32:04 Unintelligible]

Curtis McCartney: Yes. Actually--

Tom Barker: That's a good question.

Curtis McCartney: I was going to say to you.

Tom Barker: Right. We have an emergency notification system called Norse Alert that, if there's a shooter on campus or any kind of...like a fire or disaster, sends out notifications to all the student body via phone and text and email.

And we looked into putting that onto the iPhone device. However, the only method that they have out there that we're aware of currently is push notification is through Apple, and part of what Apple has stated is that you should never their push notifications for any kind of emergency and alert because they don't consider them--

Curtis McCartney: Consistent, yeah.

Tom Barker: --reliable in that context. So we've kind of toyed around the idea of developing some kind of homegrown approach. That's still kind of on the drawing board. We haven't gotten a lot of traction with our leadership in terms of getting the go-ahead to start developing something like that.

Curtis McCartney: Any other questions?

Have any of you looked into development... App? Device? Worked with Xcode and...? Awesome. What's your take on it?

Audience 8: [33:31 Unintelligible]

Tom Barker: Yeah.

Curtis McCartney: Yeah. And we were looking into using...

Tom Barker: We're looking into using some of the cross-platform frameworks like PhoneGap or Ruby Roads or the Appcelerator Titanium to develop across-the-board, just once.

And those we use, I know at least PhoneGap and Titanium use PHP and CSS and HTML and they're just wrapping it in native code. And that's certainly a direction that we're looking at with a lot of interest moving forward, because that sure beats parallel development any day of the week.

Curtis McCartney: Yeah, I mean, when you develop platform-specific like we've been doing--and we are looking to developing for more platforms like Android--like you're saying, it's more cost-effective to develop multi-platform, across-the-board use.

Audience 9: [35:21 Unintelligible]

Tom Barker: Oh. It's...

Audience 9: [35:30 Unintelligible]

Curtis McCartney: Hey, do you want to talk about it since...

Tom Barker: Well, that's the screen there.

OK. So you want to know more about the virtual campus tour that we're hinting to do? Well, we're kind of taking some inspiration from some of the things we've seen out in the marketplace.

We envision kind of an app where you have a view for each building, and you can have a photo gallery for each building inside and out and see what they look like. Our campus website uses a Flash tour, but it's iPhone--you don't get any Flash. So we're having to find another way around.

That's something we're still struggling with ourselves is how to make that work and look real nice. There are a couple of things out there currently that are pretty nice solutions. University of Charleston, I think, has a fairly nice virtual tour, and we've been looking at that.

Yes.

Audience 10: [36:57 Unintelligible]

Curtis McCartney: You know, they didn't elaborate exactly why they didn't want to use Drupal. "It seems feature-heavy," was the quote that we got from that.

Audience 10: [37:41 Unintelligible]

Tom Barker: Yeah, they, they--

Curtis McCartney: I guess maybe it was a daunting task for them and they figured they could do what they needed just using PHP, JSON, XML.

Tom Barker: Yeah, it looks like we're out of time here. Actually it looks like we ran over by a few minutes. Again, I apologize for the beginning of--

Curtis McCartney: Yeah, thanks for sitting through that. It was very--

Tom Barker: Yeah. Thanks for your patience.

[Applause]