What do students want in a smart phone application?

Recently the Students' Union at Newcastle University ran a competition (an Appathon) in which students were asked to suggest smart phone applications that would improve their experience at Newcastle University. I found this a really interesting and innovative idea, because as a lecturer who knows his way around Xcode, and can program iOS devices (and knows a thing or two about HTML5 - see Surviving the semester: Designing a virtual lab - HTML5), I was intrigued to see what the students would suggest.

If I was a betting man, which I'm not, I would have put money on the students requesting some sort of eLearning/mLearning type application that would help them with their degrees. I had no particular idea for such an application, but I thought it would be something that students might like and find useful.

Although I wasn't directly involved in the competition I did meet with a number of students from the School of Biomedical Sciences to discuss their ideas for applications. And I must say I thought our students had some pretty good ideas. However, what was immediately apparent was none of them were thinking about eLearning/mLearning. This surprised me.

What surprised me even more was that in the Apps that won the first round of the competition (Appathon winners), there was no eLearning/mLearning in sight. In fact, the top 3 App, if they did have anything in common, then it would be the communication and dissemination of information that is currently available from a number of different sources, that is they were all essentially portals that would consolidate currently available information into one handy location.

So, there you have it, what the students really want is data delivered to their mobile devices in one easy to use App.

Image: Wikimedia

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