VCU news

By Gary Robertson

Virginia Commonwealth University is riding the tide of mobile computing with its first release of VCU mobile, a mobile website and an app for the iPhone and iPod touch.

Built using Blackboard’s Mobile Central software, the app makes course information, campus maps, news and events, images and videos, and the university directory available on the go. VCU is also one of the first schools to integrate with the university’s course registration system for students to check seat availability in almost real-time, making it easier to plan course selection during registration.

“It’s just the beginning,” said Scott Davis, director of Application Services for VCU Technology Services, who is overseeing the effort.

Just the beginning is right.

Plans are in the works that will allow users to search the library catalog, access and call emergency VCU phone numbers, take a virtual guided campus tour, and view the scores, schedules and news of the VCU athletic teams. In addition to the iPhone app and the mobile website, a Blackberry app is under development and long-term plans include an app for Android phones.

VCU also worked with Blackboard to offer Mobile Learn, a free application for the iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, Blackberry and Android. It allows access from virtually anywhere to much of Blackboard’s content, including announcements from instructors, course discussions, class rosters, grades, blogs and journals, added course media and task lists.

Learning will become an ongoing enterprise, as the walls of the classroom melt into the wider world. As a result, a cadre of faculty members has been looking to the future, trying to envision the new order of things, if mobile computing and mobile devices become ascendant in higher education.

“The Pew Internet and American Life Project put out a study last year in which they said that in the next three to five years, they anticipate that 85 percent of access to the Internet is going to be through a smart phone,” said Jeff Nugent, Ph.D., co-director of VCU’s Center for Teaching Excellence and leader of the Faculty Learning Community at VCU that is exploring the potential uses of smart phones and mobile computing in higher education. “I think that within the next three years, what we’re going to see is a vast majority of students coming into the classroom or coming to the university with Web-enabled handheld devices.”

Kirk Richardson, Ph.D., an associate professor in the University College and a member of Nugent’s group, suggested that having everyone in class with an Internet-accessible handheld device could open broad new avenues for learning.

“It would be fantastic to read one of [Richmond author] Ellen Glasgow’s short stories in the place where she actually wrote it,” he said. “It is a way to put literature back into context. Likewise, if you’re doing history and you want to go to a battlefield, why don’t you look at some of the diaries that had been written about that war, at that moment on the battlefield.”

One of the stumbling blocks to students’ use of mobile devices in the classroom has been the cost of data plans for Internet access. But in this new era, Richardson said, every option must be on the table.

“As instructors, it might behoove us to take a look at whether we want to require a hardcover textbook or a data plan,” he said. “It’s not going to work on every subject, and it’s not going to work in every department, but we need to look at it.”

With an increasing number of students living much of their waking lives connected to the Internet, Nugent said it only made sense that higher education should be joining them there as partners in learning. He added that many professors already enhance their classroom instruction with content from the Internet, along with activities and drills that use cyberspace as a blackboard.

Jennifer Sherry, Ph.D., coordinator of advising and recruiting for the VCU School of Education, tries to transmit as many materials as possible to her students electronically so they’ll have nearly everything in one place when they’re studying for a test.

“Not a notebook here, a textbook there, a binder over there … they end up with all this stuff in different places,” she said.

If she is directing a rehearsal for a play, Shaun M. McCracken, an academic adviser for performing arts and fashion merchandising in the University College, said she can record sound files in the rehearsal room and upload those files to a website with comments.

“I can directly influence how my actors are performing from my phone,” she said.

As Nugent presents to various educational conferences about the prospects for using mobile devices in higher education, he said the responses have been mixed about what the future holds. Yet what is certain, he said, is that young people are acquiring and using Internet-enabled mobile devices in huge numbers and their expertise with those devices — as well as their expectations — are growing exponentially.

For college and university faculty who believe big changes are coming, like them or not, Nugent said there seems to be an emerging consensus.

“They’re saying, ‘If this is the wave of the future, how do we make sense out of it together?’”

Visit the VCU mobile website at www.vcu.edu/mobile.