Mobile Application Services: Digital Credibility in Education

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Mobile applications have made their way into our lives relatively recently, but their rise has been rapid and at times mind-blowing. Indeed, it was hard to imagine a person constantly looking into his cell phone: nowadays this phenomenon is commonplace and is projected to grow. Thus, according to Mary Meeker (2010), who:

“was dubbed the ‘Queen of the Net’ by Barron’s magazine in 1998…. now a managing director at Morgan Stanley and head of the global technology research team, within the next five years ‘more users will connect to the Internet over mobile devices than desktop PCs’ ” (Mary Meeker, 2010, cited in Ingram, 2010).

Therefore, it is no wonder that many universities have began implementing programs designed to boost their own digital credibility and thereby attract new students, one example of which is University of San Diego. In 2009, its team has finished developing and introduced to its students “an iPhone application, mobile landing site and application for BlackBerry smartphones” (Harnick, 2009). But University of San Diego was neither the first nor the last college to do so.

There were plenty of other colleges implementing essentially the same prototypes of mobile applications, which will be noted as reference guides and briefly discussed in the second part of this management report; as it is first necessary to touch upon the basics of mobile phone application facilities and services: the ones which could be made available to potential students and their families, staff running open days or dealing with part time enquires, and faculty managers monitoring student recruitment. Thus, the liaisons between these three groups should serve as the basis of all university mobile applications and lie at the core of a 3-year IT roadmap, which, along with the analysis of costs, implementation, and future of standards issues, will be discussed at the every end of this report.

The best pattern according to which the mobile phone application services, which can be made available to potential students and their families, can be described, is the one which takes into account the way in which potential students would contact and visit the university. Thus, following this line of thought, the first thing that potential students and their parents would need to do is learn the schedules of admission offices. While they could easily do so on the web, there is little doubt that it would be beneficial to allow them to do so directly from their cell phones without them having to dial any number. While this proposition may sound a little too absurd, it has become a cornerstone of the new Google mobile application service, which has been called “Click-to-Call”.

This application “makes it even easier for potential customers to reach you (the organization) by adding a click-to-call business phone number in ads that appear on mobile devices with full Internet browsers”(Google, 2011). The main advantage of this application seems to be the resulting increase of ways by which the potential students and parents could contact the university. The main disadvantage seems to be the cost, which will be recurring and will depend on the number of responses: this facet of this application, along with its implementation issues, will be discussed in the final part of the report. But for now, it would be necessary to indicate the second step in student’s journey to the university.

That would be the actual getting there part. While the usual application that helps to do so is Google Maps, this application has already become in need of further innovation, as the latest Google’s attempts at its improvement have demonstrated. But they have also demonstrated a remarkable ingenuity of Google’s software team, as their latest mobile application, called “Google Maps Navigation”, “automatically guides you along the best route given the current traffic conditions” (Williams, 2011). Moreover, Google Maps Navigation allows users to “search for directions via voice command, route, address or by business name/type… and get search along services en route” (Finch, 2009).

While it has a number of obvious disadvantages, which include the requirement of Internet connectivity and the subsequent loss of service in case the Internet connection is lost, it does have one advantage that seems to overshadow all of its disadvantages: it is free. So is a number of other Google mobile applications that can be used for the same purpose of improving potential students visiting experiences.

One of them is Google Latitude. While the Google’s official webpage of this application describes it as a way of letting you “see your friends on a map” (Google, 2011), it can also be used by admission officers traveling across the country. They can use it as a means of facilitating communication between themselves and potential students with disabilities. They can do so by putting those students’ addresses into their mobile phones, so that they could integrate their individual visits to those potential students with diabilities into the whole framework of their recruitment travels.

Thus, both staff and faculty managers, not to mention the very disabled students, can benefit from this mobile application, the only prerequisite being the necessity of asking the potential students with disabilities their addresses – but this is the usual practice of all universities and thus should be viewed as normality. So should be viewed an indirect way of exploring students’ responses about their overall experiences as university’s guests.

The mobile application that allows to do so is Google Buzz, which allows to “post a message tagged with your location” (Google, 2011). It might seem unclear how Google Buzz allows to explore students’ responses to their experiences as university’s guests, but it becomes clear when one considers the fact that staff and faculty managers can not only look at those messages posted on Buzz (provided the potential students do not make their messages private), but can also ask that mobile application for alert notifications when a message is posted about the place of their interest, which can be the university itself. Thus, the faculty managers can monitor the quality of admission staff recruitment work.

It seems all the more feasible considering the fact that when “you post a buzz from your phone, your location is attached by default” (Google, 2011). Google Buzz does have a few disadvantages, however. They include:

“creation and auto-suggest feature errors”, which are manifested in the automatic creation of “friend lists from people whom you have recently emailed from your Gmail account”, and “lack of Privacy”, which is manifested in the display of “the names of the other users with whom you have been conversing on your public profile” (Midnightauthor, 2010).

But there are a number of advantages of Google Buzz that seem to outweigh its disadvantages. They include the facts that it:

“is able to translate the latitude and longitude of your exact location into a place name…. can identify posts from friends of friend that may be interesting to you based on past behavior… and can act as an automatic spam filter, keeping the feed free of clutter” (Hope, 2010).

All of these advantages make an equivalent mobile application of Facebook an unlikely option, as it “has had a series of privacy blow-ups that have created considerable user distrust”(Coursey, 2010). Another drawback of Facebook mobile application which the author of this report has had a first-hand experience of, is the very annoying fact of Facebook webmasters making major changes to its interface when the user is just getting used to their previous changes. Various personal blogs testify that Google Buzz has so far avoided that pitfall. Thus, because of all these advantages, Google Buzz, at least in terms of its mobile application capabilities, seems to be a much better choice than Facebook.

There is yet another Google mobile application that could benefit all three groups participating in the recruitment process, those of potential students, staff engaged in running open days or dealing with part time enquires, and faculty managers monitoring student recruitment: it could so by facilitating the communication between them. The official name of this Google mobile application is “Google Translate for iPhone application”. It features an amazing array of capabilities applicable to the recruitment process:

“it accepts voice input for 15 languages, and… can translate a word or phrase into… more than 50 languages,” allows you to “listen to your translations spoken out loud in one of 23 different languages,” and gives you “the ability to easily enlarge the translated text to full-screen size”, so that you can “show the translation to the person you are communicating with” (Zhu, 2011)

This exciting and useful mobile application has seen an addition of yet another feature, called “Conversation Mode”, which, despite being in demo mode, seems to be promising a new way of interpersonal communication. It does so by allowing you to:

“simply press the microphone for your language and start speaking. Google Translate will translate your speech and read the translation out loud. Your conversation partner can then respond in their language, and you’ll hear the translation spoken back to you” (Verma, 2011)

Therefore, this mobile phone application can be used by the admission staff running open days to effectively communicate with prospective international students and can thus improve the liaison between these two groups. Despite the obvious utility of Google’s mobile applications, it would be undoubtedly beneficial to take a look at mobile applications from other companies, especially considering the fact that one of the most innovative of mobile applications has come from that sector.

Just two months ago, on February 4^th, 2011, U.S. Food and Drug Administration has cleared “first diagnostic radiology application for mobile devices…. which will allow physicians to view medical images on the iPhone” (U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 2011). Thus, it is obvious that such an application can be used by the university too, as most universities have medical schools, which are utilized not only by their research teams, but also by the students.

Thus, it is self-evident that students, both current and prospective ones, can benefit from such application by being able to view medical images and thus interact with each other and professors on the given assignment, making their whole experience more interactive. While this very application may seem like a far-off undertaking unrelated to the whole personal guide moving visiting students and their parents around the university, it really is directly related to those visting students and their parents in that it is capable of making their visits more interactive by providing them with photo information downloaded via the University Wireless system.

But it can have yet an additional advantage of attracting new students by showing them the cutting edge technologies the university employs. Thus, it would be beneficial to integrate videos of students and their teachers using this application into the university’s website.

Now that the major innovative mobile applications have been discussed, it is time to move to the discussion of future trends of mobile communications as those are related to the improvement of liaison between the university and the body of its potential students.

There have been a number of discussions about the future trends of mobile communications. Therefore, in order to understand their relative importance and the correctness of each of those those predictions, as far as they are related to the overall improvement of liaison between the university and the body of its potential students, it would be beneficial to discuss the most widely accepted future trends, which include the location-based services and mobile commerce and payments. Thus, according to Mobile Marketer, the leading online journal covering mobile marketing and commerce:

“location-based services promise big returns through linking a user’s physical location with key consumer demographics…. PayPal executive said that mobile payments are growing exponentially and provided his own company’s figures as proof” (Butcher, 2011).

As far as location-based services are concerned, Google Buzz for mobile, which has been mentioned and described in the first half of this report, allows the utilization of opportunities concerned with that future trend. As far as the second trend goes, it can be utilized by the official encouragement of university’s staff and faculty managers to use PayPal. But there is yet bigger trend, which seems to have a great potential in its all-embracing technology. It is called Near Field Communication and is described as “a simple technology that transfers small amounts of data via radio frequency identification (RFID) transponders” (Rayment, 2009).

One of the solutions that Near Field Communication offers is the modernization of doorlocks so that they can be opened and closed by the physical touch of the cell phone. According to The Near Field Communication Forum, “a partnership between Sony, NXP, Microsoft, Visa, MasterCard and more than 110 other companies and organizations” (Rayment, 2009), the two main advantages of such modernization are the following:

“the possibility to remotely send the access rights in advance to the user’s handset, and the coupling with other applications such as booking, and skipping the check-in phase” (The Near Field Communication Forum, 2011).

The Near Field Communication Forum also cites a newfound ability to “centrally manage the rights in real time without physical delivery of cards” (the Near Field Communication Forum, 2011). Thus, the costs of its installation would soon be recouped by the savings resulting from the forgone physical cards. But not only the university will no longer need to issue and deliver physical cards, it will also save its students from the burglaries, which might have resulted from the lost or stolen cards. But the question arises: what are the costs of implementation of Near Field Communication and other mobile application services?

As a matter of fact, they are relatively inexpensive. Thus, “an NFC (Near Field Communication) chip costs about $2 U.S. and can be attached to almost anything” (Rayment, 2009). Google mobile applications on the other hand, with the exception of Click-to-Call, which charges its user depending on the number of clicks, are free. Thus, their implementation should pose no challenges and can be easily accomplished via the general encouragement of university’s staff.

References

Butcher, D. (2011) What are the hottest trends in mobile right now?Mobile Marketer. Web.

Coursey, D. (2010) Five Reasons to Love Google Buzz, Five Reasons Not. PC World. Web.

Finch, C. (2009) A Guide to Google Maps Navigation for Androids. Suite101. Web.

Google. (2011) Click to Call Phone Extensions. Google Ad Innovations. Web.

Google. (2011) Google Buzz for Mobile. Google Mobile. Web.

Google. (2011) Google Latitude. Google Mobile. Web.

Google. (2011) Help Center. Google Mobile. Web.

Harnick, C. (2009) Universities need to embrace mobile: University of San Diego. Mobile Marketer. Web.

Hope, D. (2010) How is Google Buzz Different from Facebook and Twitter. Tech News Daily. Web.

Ingram, M. (2010) Mary Meeker: Mobile Internet Will Soon Overtake Fixed Internet. GigaOM. Web.

Midnightauthor. (2010) The Advantages and Disadvantages of Using Google’s Social Network: Google Buzz. HubPages. Web.

The Near Field Communication Forum. (2011) NFC as Technology Enabler. The Near Field Communication Forum. Web.

Rayment, J. (2009) Near Future of Near Field. The Globe and Mail. Web.

U.S. Food and Drug Administration. (2011) FDA Clears First Diagnostic Radiology Application for Mobile Devices. FDA. Web.

Verma, A. (2011) A New Look for Google Translate for Android. Official Google Blog:Mobile. Web.

Williams, R. (2011) You’ve Got Better Things To Do Than Wait In Traffic. Official Google Blog: Mobile. Web.

Zhu, W. (2011) Introducing the Google Translate app for iPhone. Official Google Blog:Mobile. Web.

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Mobile Application Services: Digital Credibility in Education

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