Across the nation, colleges and universities are responding to this challenge in many ways. Consider:
• Quinnipiac and Tulane universities are working with Blackboard on a pilot project that allows students to use their mobile phone instead of their campus ID card for a variety of campus transactions. Students from these pilot schools will wave their smart phones in the vicinity of a Near Field Communication (NFC)-enabled reader for access to dorms or athletic events, buying meals or other goods, and transactions such as vending, laundry, copying, and printing (see “Blackboard transforms mobile devices into student IDs: http://ecampusnews.eschoolmedia.com/top-news/blackboard-mobile-devices-029/).
• Maryville University in St. Louis has developed a campus app for enrollment that engages with prospective students in a number of ways. The app had more than 800 downloads in its first month, said Shani Lenore-Jenkins, Maryville’s associate vice president for enrollment. She added: “It’s giving [prospects] content the way they want it, when they want it.”
• The 20 Million Minds Foundation, in partnership with Inkling, has launched interactive versions of two open digital textbooks that students can access on their iPads and iPhones, with Android versions coming soon. The eTextbooks, “Introduction to Sociology” and “College Physics,” come from the OpenStax College project at Rice University, and any notes or highlights that students add to the files will accompany them automatically, regardless of what device they use to access the text.
Engaging with prospects
Maryville University, which serves about 2,000 traditional students and 5,000 students overall, has had a mobile app for a few years. But this year, “we became more strategic, looking at how we could use it to help with enrollment,” Lenore-Jenkins said.
When researching colleges and universities, prospective students typically don’t like to give out their personal information, she said, for fear of being marketed to. That can make it hard to engage with prospects, because colleges often don’t know who they are or what programs they might be most interested in.
And that’s where a mobile app can help, as a means of pushing campus information out to prospects in a highly targeted—yet more anonymous—way.
“We wanted to make sure [prospective] students had something they could opt into,” Lenore-Jenkins said—and an outreach mechanism they were more likely to sign up for.
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