Editor’s Note: PGM staff members decide on the topic of a Staff Ed together. The staff as a whole provides opinions and content included in this Staff Ed to provide thoughts about and shed light on solutions for happenings at Pepperdine
You’re out with friends and a classmate texts you — your professor has released the exam grades. You open a web browser on your phone and log into Courses, only for it to be hard to navigate. “Courses should have an app,” you say to yourself.
Pepperdine has a mobile app that tracks the shuttle, lists upcoming events and provides the operating hours for different buildings on campus. However, the app can be faulty and does not always work.
Absent on the Pepperdine app, remarkably, is a way to access your class schedule and upcoming assignments.
With a Courses app, students would be able to easily access their assignment calendar and submit assignments in the matter of seconds. Students could also receive push notifications straight to their lock screen — notifying them of an approaching due date or an urgent message from the professor.
Courses already sends emails to students when a professor posts a message through the website or when an assignment is due in 24 hours. The downfall of notifications coming through email is that not all students check their emails frequently, nor are their inboxes filled solely with essential academic information. A push notification from a mobile app would catch a student’s attention sooner and allow them to take action faster.
Opening Courses through a web browser on a mobile device is possible, but not ideal. It is inefficient and not as easy to navigate because it’s fundamentally a series of shrunken-down desktop pages. Viewing assignments or replying to a discussion board can be challenging when the website is not natively designed for mobile users.
Canvas, a competing web-based learning management software (LMS), has a mobile app for its users. The app has 4.7 stars out of 5 stars on the App Store, indicating very positive reviews.
The app allows students to check for upcoming assignments and see their class schedule without needing to log in each time. Apple users can even add a widget to their home screen to view their grades. It can be configured to send push notifications for just about anything students want it to, including but not limited to freshly published assignments, grades, and messages.
This semester, Pepperdine launched a pilot program to test Canvas, which will run throughout the 2024-2025 academic year in select courses. Professors and students participating in the program will provide voluntary feedback after using Canvas in their classrooms, which the Technology & Learning team will present to University stakeholders in the Spring. Pepperdine will then decide whether to make the switch from Courses to Canvas, meaning that students could have access to the university’s LMS via an app in the near-future.
But even if Pepperdine decides to continue using Courses, which is powered by the Sakai LMS, a better mobile solution has proved possible. Loyola University Chicago, for example, integrates Sakai into their institution’s all-encompassing mobile app. Sakai apps for students at Rutgers University and Duke University also previously existed, though both universities have switched to Canvas in recent years.
If we have an app that lets us track where the nearest shuttle is, why don’t we have one that lets us check our latest exam grade or reassure us when a deadline is approaching? It sounds like a no-brainer, and yet Pepperdine still doesn’t have a mobile app for essential academic information.
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