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MSU New Student Community

April 7, 2014 by

Legacy Wall

The University recently purchased and initiated a new Facebook app through Uversity called the Schools App. We have branded our app the MSU New Student Community. The app is a private social network for admitted students that lives on Facebook and is accessible via the desktop or a mobile device. This app is administered through admissions, with assistance from web and new media.

Legacy WallGoals

There are three main goals for the University though the use of this Facebook app:

  • Build community among prospective students
  • Ease transition from high school to college
  • Improve enrollment

How it works

When prospective students are admitted to the University, they are invited to join the app through an email, as well as in writing with their admit letter.  The office of admissions is able to send follow-up invitations at any time. Additional printed materials are also currently in development that will be included in admitted students’ packet of information they receive once they are admitted, as well as signage to use at admission events such as Showcase.

Once students sign up for the app they can log in at any time to connect with their peers, ask questions of each other or student affairs staff, and learn more about the University including student organizations, housing information, and other key events.

Impact on enrollment

Since the app has only been live for the spring semester, it is too early to know any concrete results. At the time of this writing, over 1,700 admitted students had joined the app, and we have seen multiple positive comments and interactions among the students in the app.

Filed Under: Social media, web strategy and development Tagged With: Admissions, admitted, app, community, facebook, new student community, private, schools, students

Homecoming 2012 Mobile Application

November 6, 2012 by Web Strategy and Development

Homecoming 2012 App Schedule

Homecoming 2012 App ScheduleIn support of homecoming 2012 activities, we developed a mobile application for iOS and Android devices. The application featured:

  • A schedule of events from the master calendar with filters by audience
  • An interactive map of the featured homecoming activities
  • A map of area attractions as featured in the Perfect Visit Missouri State Magazine story
  • Latest updates and discussions from twitter using the #msuhc12 hash tag.

Android app on Google Play Available on the App Store

Application Downloads and Usage

  • On iOS devices, the app was installed 350 times
  • On Android, 135 unique users downloaded the app
  • The app received 7900+ pageviews*
    *each tab change in the app counted as a pageview

Mobile applications such as this require a tremendous amount of programming time. Currently only select high-level events are targeted for a mobile application.

App development credits

  • Design: Chris Austin
  • Application Programming: Kyle Falconer and Jeremy Sweetwood, Web and new media student workers and Chad Killingsworth, assistant director of Web and new media

Filed Under: Mobile Tagged With: Android, app, homecoming, iOS

HTML5 Mobile Applications

April 26, 2012 by Web Strategy and Development

Device Testing

We made brief foray into the world of mobile applications a few years ago. Since then, we’ve been busy concentrating on upgrading our site design and infrastructure. However we have been wanting to return to producing mobile versions of high-level sites. Rather than tackle of of the big questions we have about our homepage, we decided to start on a much more limited scope: the 2012 Public Affairs Conference.

Conference apps provide a clear user experience and have a decidedly small set of tasks that everyone attending does in some fashion. After using several different apps while attending our own conferences, we were able to select the experience that was the best fit for our conference. And while the list of features wanted in the app was overwhelming, we decided to keep it simple and concentrate on the three main ones:

  1. The schedule
  2. Presenter bios
  3. Facility map

With the list of mobile devices and tablets growing by the day, we decided to stick with the original strategy and produce an HTML5 site with a native code wrapper. The good news is the situation has vastly improved for this technique.

Device Testing
Testing our app required lots of devices

Strategies that worked

  1. The entire app as a single HTML page
    I wanted to avoid the “page-loading” experience when a user selected an option. I also wanted to be able to add transitions between sections. To do this, I dynamically generated the content from javascript.
  2. Navigation by Anchor
    Rather than tying event handlers to content and then having to worry about removing them when they left the page, I used standard HTML anchor elements linking to anchors that didn’t actually exist. In my javascript I had a single hashchange event listener on the window which allowed me to handle all navigation. In fact, there wasn’t a single event listener attached to page content!
  3. Cache-manifests, Offline access and local storage
    Finally these HTML5 features are well supported by both iOS and Android devices and I was able to make heavy use of them. Learning the trick that the cache-manifest file itself should set headers to prevent being cached improved this feature. There are still plenty of bugs with it though. Local storage was used to cache the database content. Requests to refresh were made once an hour (if the user was online).
  4. Inline stylesheets and javascript
    The app was a single page so it didn’t make much sense to request a separate stylesheet or javascript. All of the styles were in the document head and the script was the last thing before the closing body tag.

Strategies that didn’t

  1. Using overflow:auto or overflow:scroll
    Turns out that anything other than overflow:hidden or overflow:visible is only supported in iOS 5 and Android 3+. Unfortunately even then both of them had quirks with it. Halfway through development my entire site layout had to be thrown out and re-coded using position:fixed elements instead.
  2. Touch gestures over scrollable content
    Mobile browsers can intercept and handle Touch gestures, however doing so prevents the browser itself from getting the event. So when is the gesture a swipe vs. when is it a page scroll event? For future apps I’ll try capturing touch events on the native app wrapper and trigger Javascript page handlers. As a workaround I rendered the swipeable area as a very wide page and caused scroll events to “snap” to predefined boundaries. Messy, but I got several comments on how nice and smooth the result was.
  3. Auto-updating content with new cache-manifest versions
    Turns out, an app stays alive on a mobile device a LOT longer than I anticipated. I figured that with normal usage an application would be killed and restarted automatically at least once a day (from low-memory triggers caused by other apps). Not so much. The next version will force a check for a new application cache version at the same time it syncs database content to local storage.

Tools used

I made heavy use of the Google Closure-tools (library, templates and the compiler). They are all designed to work well together and the dead code removal of the compiler allowed me to use many features of the library without increasing my final size with unused code.

Workflow

The features of the app were discussed with our designer, Lindsay Thomack, as well as finding apps that did similar things. Lindsay then built the design taking into account different size devices as well as handling landscape vs. portrait view. I then implemented the app and posted it.

Filed Under: Technical Tagged With: Android, app, html5, iOS, mobile

Facebook Promotions and Contests

February 16, 2012 by

Facebook has developed an official Promotions Guidlines document that all users, developers and advertisers must agree to. These guidelines govern the publicizing and administering of any sweepstakes, contest, competition or other promotion on Facebook and may change at any time without notification.

Facebook also makes clear that it can disable the Page and/or account of anyone who violates its terms of service and guidelines.

It is strongly encouraged that all users read Facebook’s official Promotions Guidlines before running any kind of promotion or contest on your Page. Below are some key takeaways from the guidelines:

  • You must not use Facebook features or functionality as a promotion’s registration or entry mechanism. For example, the act of liking a Page or checking in to a Place cannot automatically register or enter a promotion participant.
  • You must not use Facebook features or functionality, such as the Like button, as a voting mechanism for a promotion.
  • Promotions on Facebook must be administered within Apps on Facebook.com, either on a Canvas Page or an app on a Page Tab.
  • Promotions must acknowledge that the promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Facebook.

Promotion apps

Since users cannot utilize any Facebook functionalities as part of a promotion, it is required for users to use a third-party promotion app within Facebook to run their contests or promotions. Below is a list of possible promotion apps you can use on your Facebook Page:

  • ShortStack
  • Wildfire
  • Fanappz
  • Strutta

Filed Under: Social media Tagged With: app, contest, facebook, promotion, Social Media

iTunes U Changes

January 25, 2012 by

iTunes U Course screenshot

At Apple’s education event held last week on Jan. 19, the company announced three new education initiatives: iBooks 2.0, iBooks Author, and a major update to iTunes U. While the changes to iBooks and the new iBooks Author program are of interest to us, I’d like to focus here on the changes made to iTunes U.

Courses

iTunes U Course screenshotThe first change is that iTunes U now allows for full courses. A course is defined by Apple as a collection of audio, video, iBooks textbooks, ePub books, syllabi and class assignments, posts from the instructor, PDFs, presentations, and more.

While this is not a truly interactive course management tool like Blackboard, it does allow instructors to include their own iBooks textbooks, syllabi, and assignments, and gives an overall structure and timeline to their courses.

The new courses are meant to be taken at an individual learner’s own pace, just like past collections in iTunes U, however it definitely expands on what has been possible with iTunes U courses in the past.

At this time we do not have any of these new courses available for Missouri State on iTunes U, but we are hoping to test this new functionality with some volunteer instructors in the near future.

iTunes U App

iTunes U App screenshotThe other major new component of iTunes U is the new iTunes U app for iOS devices (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch). The new app looks very similar to iBooks’s bookshelf; both courses and collections in iTunes U appear within the app.

Any time a user wants to search for new iTunes U content, they will open the app and select the Catalog button on the top menu bar. The catalog interface behaves just like iTunes; when a user is finished searching the catalog, they can press the Library button to return to this bookshelf view.

It is worth noting that to use iTunes U on any mobile device, a user is now required to have both the new iTunes U app as well as have their iOS operating system upgraded to the latest version (5.01). If a user attempts to search for iTunes U content on a device with an older version of the OS, they are directed to upgrade as well as download the new app.

The iTunes U experience in the iTunes software on the desktop is, as of this writing, unchanged from how it has previously functioned; these changes only affect iTunes U on mobile devices.

Additional Resources

Below is a collection of articles I have collected since the rollout of these new education initiatives. Please visit them to learn more about the new iTunes U as well as the other new Apple education products:

  • Apple in Education
  • Initial Impressions of Apple’s New Education Initiatives
  • iTunes U 2.0: Not Perfect, Just Awesome

Filed Under: News Tagged With: app, Apple, course, course management, education, instruction, iTunes U, mobile

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