Manage your Seton Hall University Education with SHUMobile

Seton Hall University (located in New Jersey) and Blackboard have developed the SHUMobile (free) app for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. It's also available for Blackberry, Android, and Nokia devices. SHUMobile provides a student portal to a wide variety of what Seton Hall has to offer. In effect, it's one stop shopping for managing your education. The app is quite well designed and provides eight categories at present, including:

A searchable phone directory
Athletics, which allows you to drill down to each sport and break them into men's and women's teams, with a scrolling list of stories about each. Also provided are options to search for game schedules and scores.
Listings of events of the day, which are broken down into the following categories: Academic, Athletics, Campus Tours, Conferences, Exhibits, Film, Lectures and Readings, Performances, Receptions, Religious, Student Government, and Workshops. A daily listing is provided along with an easy way to move forward or back by a day. Choosing one brings up a screen with specific information on that event.
A pinch and stretch campus map that uses GPS to locate your position on campus
A scrolling list of videos
Seton Hall news (broken into categories)
A searchable listing of 250 images of people and campus life
The entire course catalog, which drills down to times, dates, instructors, and location

In my testing, I found some problems with the app. Choosing an image from a thumbnail listing either brings up a black screen or crashes the app entirely, and watching videos on an iPad gives you no way to get back to the menu when the video is done. There is also information missing from the app, such as course descriptions. I have no doubt that this will be fixed in the near future since the idea is just too good not to get perfect. Blackboard also has a huge number of client Colleges and Universities that I am sure would be interested in giving this functionality to their students. The next version will contain authentication so that students can add or drop courses right from the app. Also planned are access to University Libraries, educational databases, and a way to interact with specific Blackboard enhanced courses.

This app, though not yet perfect, has so much potential it's mind boggling. Having been both a student and a teacher, I would have killed for this amount of information in my pocket without having to pore over course catalogs or dig for information on often arcane websites. The beauty of it is in the organization of the interface. It's clean, clear, and it allows a student get to anything in a matter of seconds. If your school is now using the Blackboard Course Management System and is fairly well-heeled (Blackboard is far from cheap), you might want to nudge your administration about this sort of thing.

View Tags

Source: http://www.shu.edu/

Categories

Education

Seton Hall University (located in New Jersey) and Blackboard have developed the SHUMobile (free) app for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad....

Add a Comment

Sign in »

6 Comments

Filter by:

Jeff

How is this news? Lots of universities have been doing this sort of thing for a while.

What concerns me more, though, is *why in the hell is this an App*? Couldn't every single bit of this (save the campus map) have been done as a website? They could even mimic the look and feel of an "app" pretty trivially. All updates could be done on the fly, and the same code can be used across many devices and OSs.

This kind of app is just more stupid clutter in the app store.

Let me know when a university takes advantage of ANYTHING in iOS (or otherwise) that isn't just a glorified website in an app wrapper. Have any schools built out their campus in LAYAR (or their own augmented reality app)? I could think of a million ways that'd be helpful.

If it's an app, DO something that only apps can do. Otherwise it's just an f'n website.

October 07 2010 at 4:55 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Ryan

I took a semester of distance education courses for medical research management through George Washington University, and Blackboard is officially the crappiest web software I have ever used. The class forums were a mess, you couldn't display all responses to a thread at once, which made reading the 20 responses to your paper (which the JavaScript-enabled WYSIWYG editor would chop the heck out of) a lesson in patience. I ended up dropping out of the program and I'd cite Blackboard's software as a significant portion of the reason I left.

I've been on World of Warcraft websites that function better and were set up by someone in less than a day.

October 07 2010 at 2:57 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Michael

Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas has had a TAMU Mobile application with this same functionality for quite some time. The blackboard.com/mobile website includes testimonials from several other colleges they have partnered with on similar applications, including Standford, University of Washington and Florida State University.

I guess I should say to Seton Hall, "Welcome to the club," since this isn't exactly new.

October 07 2010 at 1:57 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

dmorton

University of Washington has had this for a bit more than a year. You can find the UW app in the app store under m.UW. There currently is an iPhone and Blackberry version. Android is coming.

David

October 07 2010 at 1:21 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

cazz

Aggregator? Yeah so?

October 07 2010 at 11:11 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Rob Fay

I'd encourage you to watch the interview between Robert Scoble and Bb Mobile: http://ow.ly/2L2qs

October 07 2010 at 9:36 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply