Pushing Content to Mobile Phones: What do Students Want?

Today we have a plethora of telecommunication gadgets within our grasp, with many higher education institutions are using them to ‘push’ content to students. Pushing can be describe as transferring real-time content in the form of a short message to a user. In the past, push-technology was used primarily to indicate a web page had been updated. The subscriber (willing or not) was sent an alert via email or a web pop-up notifying them that web content had just been updated. We have moved on from this, and are now pushing content to a user via their mobile phone. The modern mobile phone is used not only for voice calls but can be used for text, video and image messages, as well as web browsing, applications, and locationawareness. Therefore it is a device in which an array of content can be delivered. But what content do higher education students want pushed to their mobile phones? The study reported here has taken an open approach,in that it investigated what students want pushed to their mobile phones, and whether the content should be sent automatically or only if they requested it (that is via subscription). Additionally, the study compared what university administrators perceive students want pushed to their mobile phones to what students wanted. The study found that administrators’ perceptions of what and when student wanted particular content pushed to their mobile phones often differed to what the students wanted. Findings show that students would like automatically pushed short messages that covered areas such as crisis messages, outages, census dates, and lecture cancellations. This however differed somewhat to what administrators’ perceived students wanted. Furthermore, when you add the option of subscribing to particular services, their notification type (automatic or subscription), students and administrators had differing opinions. Given the option to opt-into services such as parking availability, social activities and notification of the posting of results were important to the students, though numerous services were not mentioned by the administrators or were seen as an automatic service. Although the study is a preliminary investigation, the findings indicate trends and offer insights into the ‘what and when’ content students want pushed to their mobile phones. Knowledge of this can not only improve the university experience for the learner, but it can make more effective use of institutional resources.; ;