app-personal-assistant

University gives students mobile personal assistants


Texas A&M at Galveston hopes a new personal assistant app will help students manage their time more effectively, engage more fully with the campus community—and stay in school.

app-personal-assistantMany freshmen find the freedom—and responsibilities—of college overwhelming. Loosed from tightly scheduled lives overseen by hovering parents, they lack the ability to manage their own time and can struggle as a result. Nationwide, about a third of college freshmen drop out every year.

Texas A&M at Galveston is hoping that a new mobile app will help address the problem by serving as a personal smart assistant for its students.

“Our main focus is getting students better at time management and balancing everything that they have going on in their lives,” said Joe Hoff, associate director for recreational sports and the project lead. “We’re not immune to the general climate within higher ed. We struggle with retention just like every other campus.”

Known simply as TAMUG (Texas A&M University Galveston), the app is powered by Oohlala, a Montreal-based company whose tool has been adopted by 150 colleges in five countries.

While it’s too early to tell whether the app has had any impact on Galveston’s retention rate, its popularity among students gives rise to hope. Four months after its launch last fall, about half of the school’s 2,300 students had downloaded the app, which uses a tile-based navigation system to give students access to everything from their course schedules to campus events, student clubs, maps, and even discounts at local restaurants.

The app replaces a paper planner given to all incoming students each fall that included a calendar of events. “By the time the planner was published, dates would inevitably have changed,” said Hoff. “As a concept, too, the paper planner was getting a little out of date.”

The new app, which works on both Android and iOS devices, now tells students about scheduling conflicts, can wake them in time for class, and even guide new students there via GPS. “Students put their classes in first and then start looking at the different activities they want to pursue,” said Hoff. “The app might say, ‘Hey, you can’t do that—it overlaps with a class or some other appointment.'”

(Next page: Implementation strategies; communication value)

The Value of Communication

Perhaps the app’s most valuable and popular feature is one that Hoff’s team initially rejected: social media. TAMUG incorporates a way for students to ask one another questions, search for like-minded souls, and connect as a community. “We didn’t think it would get a lot of use because students are already plugged into so many different networking media,” said Hoff, who credits Oohlala with finally convincing him to include it. “We couldn’t have been more wrong.”

Between August and December 2014, the app’s social media component hosted a total of 50,594 conversations, and the campus wall (similar to a Facebook wall) generated 280,448 views and 35,442 comments.

Use of the app’s social media has been particularly high among new students. “For some students, there is a lot of anxiety about going to a new school, a new environment,” noted Hoff. “You can tell it’s a big deal just to be able to connect with other students. It eases some of their anxiety during the transition to college.”

The value of the app’s social media feature goes beyond student-to-student interaction, however. According to Hoff, university staffers are using the app to engage directly with students who need help or have questions: Test scores and financial aid are major areas of student concern, for example.

“We make a point of having our professional staff members get on there occasionally,” said Hoff. “There are enough of us that we’re pretty prompt in responding to student inquiries or concerns. It’s definitely been a good outreach tool.”

Implementation

While staff do make an effort to monitor and respond to student queries, Hoff wanted to minimize the amount of staff time needed to set up the app and maintain it, a factor that contributed to the decision to go with Oohlala. “We had the contract signed and everything up and running in one month,” recalled Hoff. “It was a really quick turnaround.”

Danial Jameel, CEO and co-founder of Oohlala, garnered first-hand experience working at a large university, so he understands what staffers face when asked to take on another task. “Our main goal is to keep it as simple as possible,” he said, recalling his time as a social director at a school of 65,000 students. “The worst thing you can do is have another system that you have to put the same information into. It doesn’t help.”

Whenever possible, the company automates feeds from a university’s enterprise systems such as the SIS to bring in course registrations and schedules. If an automated feed is not feasible, the company has its own content-management system that can import Excel files and other data with just a few clicks.

In the case of Galveston, some of the automated tasks are on hold as the university awaits approval from the larger Texas A&M system. In the interim, students must select and add their courses to the app, and a student worker enters new events manually.

While the current system falls short of full automation, Hoff is nevertheless pleased with the results. “The fact that Oohlala could plug in our class schedules really set it apart from some of the other applications that we were evaluating,” he said.

Once in the system, the data can then be accessed by students on any device with the downloaded app. “All of the data is in the cloud,” said Jameel, adding that storage complies with all U.S. privacy laws including FERPA. “It’s in the cloud and not on a server because tomorrow you might lose your phone, or switch from an Android to an iOS device. Your data stays with you. You don’t have to redo anything.”

Looking ahead, Hoff hopes to receive the green light from Texas A&M to automate some of the feeds for TAMUG and he also plans a more aggressive outreach campaign. “We achieved a really high adoption rate with pretty minimal marketing on our part,” he said. “Next year, we’re looking at being a little less passive in our approach.”

Andrew Barbour is a contributing editor for eCampus News.

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