University Pioneers Mobile Learning Initiative

By: Paula Bernier

Abilene -- the Texas locale made famous by a crooner calling it “the prettiest town I’ve ever seen” where women “don’t treat you mean” -- may soon become just as well known for its pioneering high-tech applications in the academic vertical.

A 4,800-student institution about 180 miles outside of Dallas called Abilene Christian University has been working with Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) to enable a variety of new alert, conferencing and collaboration, document sharing, identification, payment, and polling capabilities. These applications are now, or may soon be, available to students, staff and/or visitors of the school via university-provided iPhone (News - Alert) and iPod Touch devices.

“Mobility is going to be big,” says David Puglia, CTO of the enterprise business at Alcatel-Lucent, describing the ACU deployment as a key example on this front. “It is big, and it’s going to be huge.”

The university has been an Alcatel-Lucent customer since 2001, and virtually its entire network is based on the vendor’s solutions, whether you’re looking at the IP PBX (News - Alert); the wireless LAN, which includes nearly 500 access points; application enablement; data infrastructure; conferencing and collaboration tools; or security, says Fernando Egea, direction of solution architecture for Alcatel-Lucent’s enterprise group.

ACU recently decided it wanted to take its communications capabilities to the next level in an effort to improve enrollment and retention, and to support its goal of positioning itself as a premier global university. Given 90 percent of Generation Y students already use cell phones and laptops, decision-makers at the school realized popular electronic devices could be ideal mechanisms for university outreach and student support. So it launched the mobile learning initiative.

A video at http://enterprise.alcatel-lucent.com/docs/?id=10532 promoting the program demonstrates how students can use the Apple (News - Alert) devices to discover what books they’ll need for various classes; access a campus map and calendar; and receive ACU Alerts on a range of topics, such as notices about coming thunderstorms, for example. The program, through which the college provides the devices and the students pay the monthly connectivity fees, also enables students to choose between taking classes in the traditional way, and attending classes just once a week and using their iPhone or iPod Touch devices to access the other necessary information, which starting this year will be offered on demand.

The new communications effort at ACU also encourages student engagement by enabling class members to post links related to curriculum and discussions to class Websites. And a feature called NANO, for no advanced notice, lets ACU teachers project multiple choice tests on white boards, to which students can respond via their mobile devices, and the response is immediately projected onto the white board. That means less lag time for students to see the results, and less time grading papers for the teachers, notes Egea.

Early this year ACU expects to introduce a program, which it piloted in 2009, that will enable students to use their iPhones as their student IDs. Egea says Alcatel-Lucent enabled this application by employing near field communications technology from Bell Labs (News - Alert). He explains that because the iPhone doesn’t support embedded NFC technology, the university phones will have tags affixed on the back of them. That way, rather than carrying a student ID card to purchase books or food on campus or to check out library resources, a student can do those things with his or her university-provided mobile device.

ACU’s new communications capabilities also have been used to facilitate conferences on campus, notes Egea, explaining Alcatel-Lucent integrated its collaboration platform into the university’s iPhone portal to enable instant set up of conference calls – and without a requirement for participants to disclose their private phone numbers. The university recently put this functionality to use during a virtual summit it held to share information about the new mobile learning initiative. More than 80 universities around the world participated, and each participant could see the agenda, attendee directory and other information through the iPhone portal, through which recorded sessions were later made available on demand.

The communications capabilities implemented by Alcatel-Lucent for ACU also could make campus visits a whole lot more interesting for potential students and their parents in the future. Egea says ACU today gives prospective students a tour of the campus via golf cart. One idea being batted around, he says, is to outfit those visitors with an iPhone or iPod Touch that would enable them to “touch” various readers placed around campus to get information about buildings, statues or other important points along the tour. This type of capability could also be leveraged to enable students to touch iPhone readers outside classrooms, at the library or at campus bookstores to receive a listing of the books required for their classes.

Because 70 percent of ACU revenues are from tuition, every student counts, notes Egea. The mobile learning initiative has helped the university put that thinking into practice, he adds, noting that ACU has already seen improvements in enrollment and retention since implementing the mobile learning initiative. IT

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