Enhanced student technology support with cross-platform mobile apps
Bobby Siegfried · 2011
With smartphones and other web-enabled mobile devices growing quickly in popularity, higher education institutions have the opportunity -- and challenge -- to leverage this young medium to provide dynamic content regarding services, events, and support documentation, among others. In late 2009, Lehigh University released an iPhone app dubbed "LehighU Live". The mobile device market has changed significantly since then with the addition of the widely-popular Android operating system and others like Blackberry and Windows Phone 7. In spring 2011, the student technology support team revamped their web presence with the goal of also offering support services via students' mobile devices. Our first responsibility was to provide a mobile application that can be used across platforms; however, we also wanted the user experience to feel the same as any other app on a given platform. For example, our app should feel like an Android app if the student is using an Android phone. Our second responsibility was to ensure that we could deliver dynamic content to students quickly regarding services, updates, support tips, and real-time alerts. These two major responsibilities presented significant challenges, not the least of which is that we do not have the resources to develop and/or maintain a separate app for each platform while also managing and pushing out the types of content we needed to get to students quickly. Therefore, we began looking at cross-platform mobile development frameworks such as the Mobile Web Framework (MWF) released by UCLA and other device-agnostic approaches. The challenge quickly became to build a solid, web-based mobile application that could be delivered via an app for individual platforms while at the same time accessible and uasble via mobile web browser for other web-enabled mobile devices.