BlackBerry on Campus

By  Jeff Goldman
The University of Washington, in collaboration with Blackboard Inc., has made a wide range of campus information available on BlackBerry smartphones via its m.UW BlackBerry app. The solution provides students with access to campus maps, course catalogs, sports scores and more, all in a format optimized for BlackBerry devices.

David Morton, the university's director of mobile communication strategies, says the launch of the BlackBerry app was part of the University of Washington's Strategic Mobile Initiative, a broader effort to provide the university with a world-class mobile infrastructure. "We know that mobile usage and mobile tools are becoming an increasingly important part of our daily lives and of our students' and our staffs' daily lives, and so we want to provide access to these types of resources wherever they need to use them," he says.

The first phase of the initiative, Morton says, focused on infrastructure. "Before we started this program, we had a pretty poor experience for cellular and mobile phones on campus -- coverage would be spotty at best and non-existent in some places... so we're forming some strategic partnerships with two of the four primary carriers," he says.

Morton says AT&T and T-Mobile together have already made an investment of between $2 and $2.5 million in improving the coverage and infrastructure on-campus. "We also offer discounts through those carriers to our students, faculty, and staff," Morton says.

The next phase, Morton says, was the launch of an iPhone app a few months prior to the introduction of the BlackBerry solution. "Looking at the Wi-Fi statistics, which are really the best way that we have to judge the numbers of devices... we're probably at about 15,000 or so unique iPhone and iPod touch devices on our Wi-Fi network in a given month," he says.

Still, Morton says, the BlackBerry is easily the second most popular mobile device on campus -- though it's hard to be too specific about the numbers.

"The best way we have to [count] is to look at what comes onto the Wi-Fi network," Morton says. "But we know that a lot of BlackBerrys, especially older BlackBerrys, didn't have Wi-Fi included -- and we know from talking to a lot of BlackBerry users (and being BlackBerry users as well) that not a lot of people use Wi-Fi on them even when it is available. They just stick to the cellular experience."

Regardless, Morton says the launch of the BlackBerry app has been extremely successful. He says he hears from students several times a week about ways they've used the app, from helping others find their way around campus using the map that's integrated into the application to keeping up on sports scores or checking the course catalog.

"Let's say they're thinking about taking an economics course," Morton says. "They can search through the course catalog right there, or they can drill down and go to the business school and go to economics, and view not only the course descriptions, but if they keep drilling down, it will give them very detailed information about the course, when it's offered, who the instructor is, and which building it's in."

The student can also contact the instructor directly from within the app. "If they, say, have a question for the instructor, they can tap the instructor's name, and it will then go and look up the instructor in the directory and automatically address an email to them -- or, if the instructor has their phone number in there, automatically allow them to dial the instructor, all from within that course module," Morton says.

Looking ahead, Morton says, other functionality under consideration includes the addition of personalized content. "What if a student would like to be able to go online and look at their current grades in their class, for example?" he asks. "We need to be able to provide authentication and some other back-end infrastructure to make that happen in a meaningful way, and in a secure way."