New app: Santhana Naidu, web services director in Indiana State's Office of Communications, shows off the university's new mobile phone app, ISU Mobile, after a press conference in the Hulman Memorial Student Union Wednesday. Staff photo by Joseph C. Garza
TERRE HAUTE — Increasingly, today’s college students depend on their smartphones and expect the most up-to-date features.
With that in mind, Indiana State University has launched a new mobile phone application, ISU Mobile, to replace one that’s become outdated.
The new app lets students connect to their classes and see assignments, grades and class news. They also can search the course catalog or a campus directory to find other students, faculty or staff.
In other features, ISU Mobile lets them call up a campus map, including bus routes and schedules, keep up with ISU athletics scores and view the latest campus news and events.
“Students want more and more things available on their mobile devices,” said Santhana Naidu, ISU web services director. “This is a pretty important step for the university … We’ve tried to address a need.”
The new app is replacing “State Mobile,” launched in January 2011, which has had more than 7,000 downloads. It will end Oct. 13.
The new app is just now being rolled out.
“We are trying to aggressively communicate that to students to get them to download the new app,” Naidu said. Further information is available on the ISU website at www.indstate.edu.
ISU has conducted focus groups, and one of the biggest requests from students was that they wanted to be able to use the app to connect to their classes, using Blackboard (a learning management system), Naidu said.
ISU Mobile addresses that request.
“They can look at their class activities using this app and see what their professors have posted,” using a mobile device rather than a laptop, Naidu said.
ISU will continue to roll out new features in the future.
Next year, the goal is to “open this platform” and provide access to students to create their own apps and mobile websites, as long as content is “appropriate,” he said. Students could launch it on their own without it being part of the institution app.
“We know that the mobile industry in general is a growing industry,” Naidu said. “As an institution, we want to prepare students who have an interest in the mobile field to take advantage of opportunities here.”
He gave the example of a student developing an app that could locate available parking spots on ISU’s campus.
To be part of ISU’s mobile app, however, an application would have to be approved by an ISU committee. “Just because it’s good for one person doesn’t mean it should be applicable to everybody,” he said.
Naidu and Amy Bouman, social media developer, demonstrated ISU Mobile on Wednesday.
Rachel McClelland, ISU director of student publications, attended the demonstration. Currently, the campus newspaper, the Statesman, does not have a mobile app, she said.
In the future, the ISU Mobile platform may provide a way for the Statesman to make its content available through a mobile app. “That’s something we’re really interested in,” McClelland said. “It something we do need to have.”
Getting students to read a paper newspaper “continues to be a challenge,” she said. “If we can get our news available to them in a portable device, we’ll be a more valuable commodity for them.”
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