Innovate @ Fresno State

Innovation Minigrant Final Report

Description of the Project

Project name *

Mobile Student Intranet

Project Abstract (< 250 words) *

The Mobile Student Intranet is designed to deliver mobile-first engagement across the Student Life Cycle. With our Student Experience-Based Dynamic Content Strategy, students stay informed whenever and wherever via the devices of their choice, including wearables.

The Dynamic Content Strategy employs the concept of hybrid information “buckets” (http://tinyurl.com/FSM1stUX) designed around hierarchy and priority, as well as a student’s current phase within the Student Life Cycle, allowing for a highly customized experience combining information a student both needs and wants.

The proposed framework for the Mobile Student Intranet (http://tinyurl.com/FSM1stTI) is designed to distribute digital information relevant to students. This Communication Hub is the place to publish and consume content of all sorts, i.e. integration of SIS, LMS, and event systems. Based on the core Information Object Model (rules - metadata and behaviors - tags), a Rule based engine (AI) is designed to facilitate persona-based (needs) and individualized (wants) information.

The technology stack initially includes React Native, a cloud-based back-end (i.e. AWS Lambda, DynamoDB and API Gateway), Qualtrics, and Google Analytics.

This concept is scalable to support the global university experience.

Which Innovation Focus Area(s) does your project best apply to?

Future of Student Experience Support Systems

Mobile student systems
Student-centric experience design
API's to drive agility and crowdsourced systems development

Strategies for Cloud Migration

Development of cloud and hybrid-cloud architectures *

Visual and Interface Technology

Wearable technologies
Advanced mobile internet technologies

Briefly describe your strategy for evaluating the impact and effectiveness of your project *

Qualitative attitudinal research in the form of interviews, focus groups and surveys, as well as behavioral research in the form of usability lab studies and ethnographic field studies
Understand and improve users’ mobile campus experience through embedded analytics. (Quantitative research)
Close collaboration with ASI (Associate Students Inc.)
Pilot with student participants
Opensource - external partners (other CSU campuses)

Outcomes

Please write a narrative of no more than 500 words describing your project and what you accomplished. Refer to your evaluation strategy in the last section. *

We have completed a robust proof of concept of our proposed Mobile Student Intranet framework consisting of:

User Experience:

Functioning Mobile app based on student-focused information architecture including multiple methods for navigating and viewing messages, subscribe/unsubscribe to subjects, push-notification of high priority messages.
Communicator website to categorize, prioritize and distribute messages to the mobile app.

Technology Framework:

Communication Hub, the core Message Distribution System integrated with Google Firebase Cloud Message system, to publish and consume content through the web communicator frontend and RESTful APIs for integration of data sources based on the core Information Object Model and Rule-based engine for message classification and subscription hierarchy management.
Cross-platform mobile app in both iOS and Android platforms developed in Reactive Native.
Embedded Mobile App analytics to understand and improve users’ mobile campus experience. (Quantitative research)

Evaluation Strategy

Four forms of user research including:
- One-on-one stakeholder interviews
- A communicator focus group based on an initial prototype,
- A usability study of students using the app, and
- A three-week diary study consisting of students documenting all messages received from the campus at the start of the semester.

The project is documented and published at Github - Fresno State repository at https://github.com/FresnoState/mobilestudentintranet.

Please summarize the impact of your project on your campus and beyond *

Based on our user research, we feel very confident that our proof-of-concept “Message Hub”, once developed into a production-ready campus service, will solve multiple communication challenges that our campus faces. A large amount of work defining needs had been carried out prior to this grant as part of two Fresno State Bold Idea projects. This allowed our design process to be very focused and our user research has validated our solution.

This grant project provided an opportunity for us to define a new innovative architectural framework for both Technology and User Experience. The adoption of the MVVM design pattern with the cross-platform Reactive Native mobile framework empowers us to utilize a User Experience-driven design process and Agile software development methodology.

We have explored and established several innovative technologies beyond our current campus mobile app to be the Future of Student Experience Support Systems by introducing the hybrid cloud architecture with:

Adoption of the Google Firebase Cloud Messaging platform to support the new mobile app based notifications as well as the traditional emails and SMS text messages;
Design of a fully RESTful API architecture for future integrations with SIS and LMS; and,
Deployment of noSQL (Mongo DB) backend information-data architecture to support the Channel/Subject/Area dynamic information model (un-structured);

Web links to any documentation or artifacts related to your project

Dissemination Plan (How do you plan to share your results with others?) *

Present the project prototype and study to the Technology Services leadership for consideration of future support for continued development
Share with CSU peer campuses for future collaboration and establish partnerships, i.e. submit present proposal for inclusion in the CSU Technology Conference 2018
Revisit initial stakeholders to deliver project results to encourage future sponsorship and resources.

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