MobileEdu

During the keynote, Blackboard announced that they had purchased TerriblyClever, a company that specializes in creating software applications for mobile devices for the higher education market. Specifically, they have created mobile apps that access consolidated data from disparate sources on a college campus.

The app they demoed for the conference during the keynote was for Stanford. They showed how a student would be able to look up faculty or staff in the directory, access the course list, enroll in courses, and search/view maps of campus with their own location pinpointed by the iPhone’s GPS (interestingly, they didn’t demonstrate how the app would hook up with the LMS). The various data sources were very well integrated; you could look up a course in the course list and then either click the professor’s name to look her up in the directory, or click the room number to show it on the campus map. They described how they could pull in data from just about any source on campus: sports scores, advising, financial aid, etc. All in all, it appeared to be… well… terribly clever.

They claim that the application works on any web-enabled phone. To prove it, they showed a directory lookup on an iPhone simulator, as well as a directory lookup in a browser pointed to the mobile web site. Both applications returned the same contact information. At this point they said, “See? It works on both, so now we’ll just demo on the iPhone to make things easier.” Then they proceeded to demo all sorts of functionality that won’t work on many (most?) web-enabled phones: GPS location, multitouch zooming of maps, etc. It’s just a hunch, but I’m thinking that the experience on a regular ol’ phone like my Samsung Saga wouldn’t be nearly as rich as the iPhone experience. But all students have iPhones (or iPod Touches), right?

I stopped by the booth later to chat with the guys from TerriblyClever… I mean Blackboard MobilEdu… and asked them some questions about how they could come to my campus and pull together all these various data sources. Think about your campus; how easy would it be for you to get access to pull data from your directory, your course catalog, maps of your campus, sports scores, and campus announcements, so you could aggregate it in a single application? You store all of this data on a central database, right? You don’t? And even if you do, it’s no big deal to get access to query all of it, right? How about letting your app actually enroll students in a course? I’m guessing that your SIS administrators would have no problem letting a third party application, hosted on an off-campus server, have this ability. I know mine would be fine with it… not.

Anyway, I asked the MobilEdu guys how they go about this, and they told me that they like each campus to designate a person as a point of contact who can coordinate the efforts with all of the owners of the various data sources. They prefer that the data be exposed via web services, so their server can query it in real time, but they are willing to work with the data in whatever form you have it: CSV files, XML files, direct database access, etc. They told me that if they can’t query the data via web service, they’ll just pull it all over to their server in a batch process to facilitate supplying it to the end users. I’m thinking that the Information Security office might have some issues with our data on someone else’s servers, however, so it sounds like we would have to “webify” all of our data sources to make this work. I asked them, if we did all the work to setup the web services and provided them with the necessary documentation for how to call those services, would that reduce the cost to roll this service out? They said no. I guess it’s one price fits all.

Obviously, the concept works… they’ve done it for several large campuses. I’m just not sure our campus would be ready for it anytime soon… and I’m not sure we’re alone.