College technology went on the move in the 2010-11 academic year, venturing into mobile platforms like smartphones and tablets such as the iPad. The devices were used within classes and without for teaching, reading texts, student affairs, contacting alumni, and recruiting prospective students. But the movement—driven by the recognition that people were spending more time on mobile devices—went in fits and starts. Higher education, never a rapid adapter, struggled to figure out how best to make use of mobile devices and new capabilities.
Take, for example, Stanford University. Its Palo Alto campus gave birth to Google and Yahoo and is one of the most tech-savvy places in academe. A survey last year of 200 iPhone-owning Stanford students portrayed them as obsessed, possibly addicted. Most of them said they slept next to their phones.
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But last year, when Stanford’s School of Medicine lent iPads to all new students, there was a backlash. Many didn’t like using them in class. Officials had hoped to stop printing an annual average of 3,700 pages of course materials per medical student. But in most classes, half the students had stopped using their iPads only a few weeks into the term. It wasn’t just Stanford. When the University of Notre Dame tested iPads in a management class, students said the finger-based interface on its glassy surface was not good for taking class notes and didn’t allow them to mark up readings. For their online final exam, 39 of the 40 students put away their iPads in favor of laptops, because of concerns that the tablet might not save their material.
The trick, colleges are learning, is to find the sweet spot where the technology and the type of instruction meet. Then students and professors are much more likely to use it. At Stanford, in an anatomy class, students can use the iPad to draw and annotate structures with their fingers, something they can’t do on a laptop. And an anesthesiology professor pointed out that more advanced students can watch a video in the hospital showing how to conduct a complex procedure right before they are about to perform it. If they forget exactly what to do during an emergency, they can pull up a cheat sheet on an iPad showing the steps they should follow. That’s all possible because of the portability of the device and its ease at handling multimedia.
Textbook publishers also are learning to adapt their wares to tablet technology. Digital textbooks, in the past, have been criticized as static PDF versions of the printed books. Now publishers such as McGraw-Hill and Pearson Education have invested in a San Francisco-based company called Inkling, which offers multimedia-rich iPad versions of several publishers’ textbooks by the chapter or by the book. They are designed to take advantage of the iPad’s touch capability and graphical interface, with interactive quizzes and 3-D illustrations. The scrolling, hyperlink-heavy text reads more like a Web site, and the experience appears to be engrossing, according to college officials that have used the texts. The company had only a few dozen offerings early in the year but plans to expand to hundreds in the fall of 2011. Inkling also plans to expand the line to other tablets when they gain greater traction in the market.
And students really like the mobile devices. In the test class at Notre Dame, students were loath to give up the iPads at the end of the semester. Other colleges testing the tablets in classes found that they made it easier to pull in outside readings for courses, and made collaboration on group assignments much simpler.
Smaller mobile screens, on smartphones, were also making inroads if colleges found the right application. Some compelling ones: multimedia study guides, with the screens showing animated versions of flash cards; campus maps and real-time bus and transit schedules; and an app that rewards students with good class-attendance records with discounts on campus meals.
Many colleges do not have the technical and financial resources to design their own apps like this. So they are turning to vendors like Blackboard Mobile, which sells—for smartphones—a campus map, a searchable directory, athletics information, and a news feed, all of which are updated and customized by the client college. Other institutions with more in-house programming expertise are opting to build their own. One, Ohio State U., has created an app that tracks the university’s athletics teams for alumni.
But some colleges are finding that with so many new smartphones and tablets, it is hard to create apps that work on all of them. Instead, institutions are turning to mobile-optimized versions of their Web sites, which recognize an incoming Internet connection from a smartphone or tablet and send out versions of the university’s Web pages that are specially formatted for such devices. Four University of California campuses have already gone this route.
And all institutions are learning that to truly reach mobile students, professors, and staff, they have to spend money improving their wireless and cellular networks. Dead zones are one thing no mobile campus can afford.
Josh Keller contributed to this article.
