Steve Martin - The University of Northampton
The development of The University of Northampton's smartphone app, iNorthampton, was initially driven by two key initiatives:
- The need for effective marketing to prospective students.
- Utilisation of technology for more effective learning.
The University's Marketing department had identified a need for a smartphone app for prospective students. In addition, the Learning Technology department had also recognised the need for an app to support student learning. The department was in the process of identifying current mobile device ownership and preferred features through a staff and student survey. It was decided that it was beneficial for both departments to work together to select a supplier that could build an app for both audiences and Blackboard Mobile was selected.
The web team was tasked with providing some of the core data for the app as it was held in the Jadu Content Management System (CMS) and was available on the University's website.
The data provided was:
- Course details
- News
- Events
- People directory (contact information for all staff)
A mock up of the courses feature of the app was developed by the web team and this was customised for UK use so that it could be built by Blackboard.
The web team made the decision to adopt a web services strategy to support the app rather than send spreadsheets of the data for each aspect.
We had the option of sending CSV's of data for all of these aspects, but we decided to go down the web services route so that the data was taken live from the CMS when it was needed. This had the obvious advantage that as the data was changed on the site, these changes were reflected almost immediately in theapp.
Steve Martin, Web Manager, The University of Northampton
Based on the structure of the data required for the app as specified by Blackboard, the web team then built the web services as custom resources on top of the standard MyJadu API framework.
This was a huge time saver for us as we just needed to define the methods needed and the structure of the resulting XML without worrying about building the API from scratch. As an example, the web services for the people data were built in a matter of hours.
Steve Martin, Web Manager, The University of Northampton
Once the data had been sent to the app, the web team created mobile optimised web views of the course, news and events data for accessing from within the app. The use of JQuery Mobile proved a good solution for creating mobile views and they removed all of the extra clutter that came with the standard web layout.
These mobile views were called from the web services by simply adding an 'm' into the URL, so for example here is a mobile view of a course entry page: www.northampton.ac.uk/courses/80/m
This meant that we could just allow access to the mobile versions from within the app until we had rolled out a mobile strategy for the entire site. This worked
Steve Martin, Web Manager, The University of Northampton
really well and we were able to do this by creating Jadu custom scripts for the mobile optimised content types.
To complete the initial stage of development The University of Northampton added simple device detection to the website so if someone accesses the site using either a iOS/Android or Blackberry device, they get a link at the top of the page that takes them to a mobile optimised page that gives the direct app download link for that device. It also allows access to the web version of the app in case they don't want to download and install the native app.
The University of Northampton is about to start Phase 2 of the app development. This will include the development of the ability to see the location of University events on the map so attendees can easily find the location using GPS. This development will require some customisation of the Jadu events form to allow the CMS users to select from a fixed list of locations. Also, categories for events will be included in the web services to allow for further refinement of events for the user.
Follow this link to view Steve's slides from Experience Day 2011 http://speakerdeck.com/u/s2martin/p/inorthampton-and-jadu
For further information about the project or to download the app, go to www.northampton.ac.uk/mobile.