Mar 30
2021
Students’ Needs Change Throughout the Year: A Campus App Should, Too
By Valerie Craig, manager of technology applications and services, The University of Southern Mississippi.
Our students’ needs change during the course of a semester. They don’t remain the same. And yet, the mobile campus app used at many colleges and universities looks exactly the same on Day One of the semester as it does at the end.
At The University of Southern Mississippi, our mobile campus app is dynamic, not static. When students open up the app, the information, links, and resources they see on their screen changes to meet their shifting needs and priorities throughout the semester.
As a result, students are always just one click away from the resources they need to navigate their college experience successfully.
We’re constantly looking at our analytics to learn as much as we can about how students, faculty, and other stakeholders are using our iSouthernMS app. In perusing the data, we’ve learned two important lessons.
The first is that students don’t come to our app to play around. They don’t consider it a form of entertainment. There are plenty of other apps they can use for that purpose. Instead, they rely on our app to help them succeed at the business of being a student.
The second lesson we’ve learned is that the features of our app that are used most frequently change during the course of a semester.