Recently I was lucky enough to go the mobile workshop at Bristol University, held as part of the JISC funded mobile work. It was being run by Mike Jones (an ex-Cardiff guy, so guaranteed quality).

Firstly - Bristol needs less of a hill. Seriously. Sure I saw Edmund Hilary near the Wills Memorial. Secondly - are all uni IT departments housed in the oldest buildings available? Once arrived though, was good to see a spread of reps from different universities. As usual, as much benefit was from the chats in between, comparing how different people are working. Quite reassuring to see all unis seem to have the same issues.

Student Engagement

One of the themes of the day was around the usability of apps, and what students actually want from mobile (note the focus of most uni apps is, correctly, students rather than staff). Bristol involved an external UX company to help there. Though that was done after the app was complete, rather than at the start of the development process. 

Surprisingly, a lot of unis seem to have trouble with student engagement. Who to speak to, how to get feedback etc. Bribery and free ipod minis seem useful tools though. Some used education fairs and teaching & learning workshops. The UX company above held some workshops with the bribery approach.

The workshop results were interesting. Although a self selecting sample (fairly tech interested and with smartphones) and very small sample size, still worth looking at.

The most used features were:

• News
• Email
• Social
• Maps 
• File stores (dropbox mainly)
• Notetaking
• Banking (interesting - less security/fear than older users)
• Games
• Blackboard VLE for lectures & timetables, but "really big problems" (unspecified!)

The things they loved about mobiles:

• Freedom, sharing, ease, instant, versatile all in one devices

The things the hated about mobiles:

• Slow (HTC specifically mentioned!), battery life, data costs, sounds (beep beep!), and interestingly their dependancy on them and the lack of boredom - there's always another level of angry birds waiting...

The UX company then played some UX games - rather than simply asking what people wanted, which never works. This was was around what education related things you'd see yourself using in a couple of year's time on your mobile. In priority order they were:

• Email
• Timetables/calendars
• Library access
• Contacts
• Ebooks
• Blackboard
• File storage
• Discussion boards
• Department info
• Campus maps
• Wifi map
• Societies
• Bus timetables
• Exam results

Now this is a bit different to other surveys - but could be sample size and specific setups that Bristol has. But still interesting. Also important to note that a uni provided app may not be the appropriate place for all those features - email, say, may be better offered separately.

They felt the current MyMobileBristol was good, though seen as something that's perhaps not massively useful to current students, but was perceived to be good for external and open day visitors. There was a need for slightly more personalised content. This seems common with the first version of most uni apps - presumably because authentication and targeted content is hard!

Native vs Web

This is a thorny old one - for general mobile development too. The consensus was that unis don't have the resources, and would almost be irresponsible money wise, to develop native apps on every platform. You either go web based, or look at some form of cross platform framework. Appcelerator and Phonegap being the main ones. 

Web based is obviously much more open, cheaper to develop and update, with no approval processes. One codebase and available to all. From a development side, this is what I'd personally prefer. Native apps are also very tricky in terms of developer skills in typically small university teams. Committing to objective-c is a whole new line of support, training and maintenance on shrinking budgets. Most teams have potentially much more cover for HTML based apps, as they'll generally have a web team already.

ROI for native apps was mentioned too. Say you invest a lot of money developing a Blackberry native app. Then in a year's time Android is the most popular and Blackberry's dwindled away (mobile landscape changes very fast!). That's a lot of uni investment essentially gone. 

Oxford, Bristol and Cardiff's (upcoming) mobile apps

But, there are arguments for apps. There's a feeling of commitment with installing an app. You've added it. It's yours. You're not just visiting a site. There's less transience. Student surveys have shown a common comment on webapps is "it's great, when will it be an app?". But simply adding a icon is enough in many people's heads for it to be an "app" (normal people don't care if it's obj-c, java or HTML under the hood!), so perhaps it's not really a question of native per se, as developers think of it. 

The JISC approach, as they tend towards open web technologies and standards, is more on the webapp side. In fact, they have a very good briefing paper (PDF) on it.

The approach we're taking in Cardiff is HTML5 based webapp with a PHP backend, but (app store rules permitting...) wrapped with Phonegap. It gives us one codebase, in a language we have plenty of developer cover for - and even opens it up to schools and less developer-y types. We still have the pain of app builds and submissions though. You don't get quite the functionality of pure native, but all the other advantages far outweigh that. Phonegap's a little new and unproven though, so it's cutting edge. But doing the webapp first is the prudent approach at least.

The discussion then went on to the point that, actually, the UI implementation is almost a bit of a distraction. It should only be a light view layer in a decently architected system. Just a few screens that consume JSON. The real time and effort is in the underlying data services. This is where a lot of universities go wrong - focussing too much on the front end "app" bit, rather than the holistic architecture of their systems. Have you got open data that you can expose in whatever format you need - be it a portal, a mobile app or even a facebook app?

This is an area the MyMobileBristol and Oxford solutions have addressed well. MyMobileBristol has a Java server side app that harvests data from pages and feeds, stores as RDF with SPARQL queries, then caches and spits out for mobile use.

Council Involvement

Something some universities have done is involve the local authorities in their apps. So including, say, public library information, public wifi hotspots or public transport times. 

This obviously blurs the boundaries and target audience of the apps a bit. It also depends a lot on the relationship between the university and the local council (Bristol seems good - they even share their network infrastructure!).

And having worked for a mobile dev company previously - does it start to step on toes of the commercial sector, should uni funded projects go wider? Or is that exactly what unis should be doing?

Culture, Pervasiveness & Fun

Despite not being quite as directly related to the core mobile work, assistant director Nick Skelton sparked a lot of cogs whirring in my head. Certainly the area was thinking about most on the train home. He's involved in the local theatre group, and talked a bit about pervasive media. Very good presenter by the way.

This got me thinking... 

One of the examples mentioned was The Hat Game. This was a simple hat with GPS embedded that people had to track down. News clip from the beeb below:

The Hat Game

Now there's quite a lot of this kind of thing about - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Location-based_game for more. And there are variations on it and different names - pervasive games, social/urban games, transmedia etc. But generally involves "real life" running around, often with some theatre and some technology thrown into the mix.

Now I've not entirely got my thoughts together on this one, but deciphering some of my notes from the day:

• Cardiff is good at this. We've had events like Photomarathon (run around taking 12 photos in 12 hours) and Dockers Run, and innovative groups like ThinkARK.
• We've even got a festival on the urban games from PlayARK
  
  Image from PlayARK's flickr
• We're an arty city. Indie places like Chapter Arts & Sherman, student places like Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama, right up to the Millennium Centre. Teaming up with an arts group perhaps?
• The university (team I now run) has some really good mobile developers. Perhaps there's scope for using them on some innovative one-off ideas. 
• This sort of thing wouldn't be for day to day student use - but perhaps open days, or for freshers? Something location based, going round the various campus buildings? Or ways to meet & get involved with other students? A GPS based mobile app. Or taking mobile photos of locations.
• Branding could be an issue for some unis - may not want a Russel Group one to seem too frivolous. Or may be good to have an element of fun? If a bit off-brand, perhaps something via a student's union.

What Next

It was a really useful session for someone new to the education sector. And sparked a lot of thought, which is always a good sign. Obviously a lot of universities and eduction places are just getting to grips with mobile development. No one really knows where it's heading - which is what makes it so interesting.

There's almost little benefit having concrete long term strategies in this area as the landscape shifts so fast. The key seems to be getting the data and services in place, with an open cross platform front end, and to be agile enough to change quickly as needs and features emerge...