The following news item was originally published in University Business Magazine:
http://www.universitybusiness.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=673&p=2#0
...Gotta Get a Message to You
Beginning with classes in fall 2007, students will be using cell phones in myriad ways: downloading course announcements; sending text messages to professors; accessing academic information that was digitally “tagged” during a lecture. They will also use their cell phones in the classroom-as direct response devices that allow for instant polling on surveys and quizzes.
A group of 20 students and several faculty members, currently testing the technology, will act as a focus group for shaping the rollout later this year, says Lonnie Harvel, CIO and vice president for educational technology.
Utah State University has come up with yet another use for texting: to send sports enthusiasts ticket info. The athletic department has been doing this for about 18 months, says Tom Hale, director of the Big Blue Scholarship Fund.
USU uses SCO Group’s Shout program to push messages to defined groups. For example, alumni who played football at USU receive tailored messages about upcoming games. Scholarship fund donors receive invitations to specific dinners and fundraisers. In addition, USU can turn voice mail into e-mail that can be text messaged to a cell phone or sent to a standard e-mail client. A voice application can be activated, allowing USU to send customized messages. “A head football coach can issue a personal invitation to a game and a student can give news on recent events,” says Hale.
The word is out about text messaging to cell phones, which explains why more companies are jumping on board.
Hobsons, which helps IHEs with online recruitment and other technologies, just announced a new service allowing customers to text message and post RSS messages to their web feeds. Research from students and prospects indicates that these are the formats they want to access, says Paul Freedman, managing director of Hobsons EMT, the company’s e-mail and web-communication division. Conducted online with students who use the CollegeVue search site, the research shows users are most open to alerts about application deadlines, financial aid reminders, and status updates on pending applications.
Horizon Wimba’s learning management system has added the Pronto service, allowing students and faculty using Blackboard and WebCT to text and IM each other. Grand Rapids Community College (Mich.) has signed up more than 100 users for Pronto, says Eric Kunnen, coordinator of instructional technologies, who foresees the program as helping students and instructors to work more collaboratively. GRCC will eventually use it for crisis communication.
NEC Unified Solutions released its Emergency Campus Notification Solution in mid-2006. In a partnership with XTEND Communications Corp., the company can send alerts to all students, or segments of a student population. Emergency notices can be pushed to all cell phones, PDAs, websites, and digital signs on campus.
Also allowing users to push alerts and urgent information to digital signage screens on campus is Chyron Corporation.
How It Works
Sending messages to cell phones costs money. Sometimes students pay a per-message fee, which they agree to do when they give up their cell phone numbers, and sometimes the fee is absorbed by the IHE. At USG, Schlosburg has agreed to pay a licensing fee to e2Campus for the right to send 300 to 400 messages per month. The service is completely browser-based, allowing administrators to log on, create a message, and send it to cell phones, website pages, PDAs, and other media.
Downing at Baruch shares that his agreement with Rave has the college paying a flat annual fee for each of the 4,000 students who have provided their cell phone numbers. That fee is “less than what it would cost to buy venti-sized coffee at Starbucks. (A venti-sized cup o’ Joe is the largest-size and the price is usually a couple of bucks.)
Further, Rave can supply cell phones to all students, a cost that can be as low as $15,000 for a smaller-sized student population, but as high as six figures for others, says Raju Rishi, Rave’s COO.