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  • REACh demo at JISC 2009
  • Video demonstrating REACh now available!
  • Results of REACH pre-survey

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  Database development e-Administration interface JISC REACh release RSS SMS

The code for REACh is now avalible here.

REACh and the other IRET projects joined an end-of-programme meeting at the Studio in Birmingham on 2009-05-05. The event focussed in the morning on distilling lessons from the projects for the e-Framework and the Innovation Base.

REACh was able to contribute

• an interaction model
• a technical architecture diagram
• user requirements
• software implementation
• service instance
• ideas for comparing REACh with OnlyConnect to develop a service model

The afternoon session focussed on communicating lessons learned from REACh and related projects

REACh will be demonstrating at 09:40 on Stand 1 at the 2009 JISC Conference in Edinburgh (2009-03-24)

We’re scheduled to present with colleagues from Bolton University’s Only Connect Project who’ve also been looking at ways for institutions to communicate with students using more effective channels. Should be a good slot.

We’ve commissioned a short video to show how the approach pioneered in REACh of integrating text messages with standard VLE communication can improve the student experience.

It’s available from MMU’s podcasting server as an MP4 file…

And on YouTube as an FLV…

We worked with a student from MMU’s BA (Hons) course in Digital Marketing and a local audio-visual production company (threedegreeswest.co.uk) to develop a promotional video that showed how important announcements can be liberated from the VLE and sent via more appropriate channels.

The video shows “Ben” rushing to his 9am lecture, only to find it has been postponed until 11am for a guest speaker. Ben goes to check whether there was anything on the VLE about this and eventually finds an announcement. Surely there has to be a better way…! The video then switches to glorious technicolour to show Ben signing up for the REACh text-messaging service. A tutor makes an announcement as normal via the VLE about assignments due for collection, which he flags as “URGENT”. The REACh software picks up this urgent announcement and sends it to all students on that area who’ve signed up to receive texts. Ben receives the text and goes to collect his assignment. By the look on his face, he’s got a good mark or maybe it’s the REACh service he’s so happy about!

The project will be releasing further videos demonstrating the SMS and RSS features of REACh later.

The techie bit…

The REACh project will be releasing the software it has developed for sending Blackboard Vista Enterprise VLE announcements as text messages under an open source license within the next few weeks. The software has defined a generic text-messaging service interface and has been delivering its texts via an implementation of this interface which calls the API offered by TxtTools for accessing its SMS services.

Here are the results from our pre-survey of potential REACH users to see what their needs are. We will be re-doing the surveys once we have completed the trial and can get feedback on the effectiveness of the SMS and RSS feeds. We have well-over a 100 students trying the service and this is growing by bringing in new groups such as business and sociology.

REACh Questionnaire Data

 

Summary of data from paper questionnaires (n=64):

 

	Yes	No
Do you have a mobile phone?	64 (100%)	0 (0%)
Do you use text messaging?	64 (100%)	0 (0%)

 

	Min	Mean	Max	Valid n
Messages received/week	3	125	650	63
Messages sent/week	30	133	600	34

 

	Yes	No	Valid n
Do you use a mobile phone for study?	53 (85%)	9 (15%)	62
Would you be interested in the REACh service?	44 (72%)	17 (28%)	61
Do you subscribe to any text notification services?	11 (17%)	53 (83%)	64
Do you subscribe to any web site feeds?	8 (13%)	55 (87%)	63

 

	Never	Every few years	Once a year	More than once a year	Valid n
How often do you change your mobile phone number?	39 (62%)	17 (27%)	4 (6%)	3 (5%)	63

 

	This service would be useful
Timetable changes	63 (98%)
Reminders of assessment deadlines	56 (88%)
Assessment marks available	53 (83%)
Assessment details available	45 (70%)
Tutorial preparation tasks	45 (70%)
Additional resources available	39 (61%)

 

How students currently find out about announcements (n=64):

 

	WebCT announcements	WebCT other	Email	From the lecturer directly	From other students	Other	Don’t receive this info
Timetable changes	34	20	2	41	31	1	2
Reminders of assessment deadlines	37	11	4	24	30	2	7
Assessment marks available	25	26	6	31	12	0	3
Assessment details available	30	33	4	28	18	0	0
Tutorial preparation tasks	27	19	4	34	20	1	0
Additional resources available	29	30	4	34	19	0	0

 

Summary of data from online questionnaires (n=77)

 

	Yes	No
Do you have a mobile phone	77 (100%)	0 (0%)

 

	None	1-10	11-30	31-100	100 +
How many text messages (SMS) do you receive per week?	0 (0%)	10 (13%)	17 (22%)	34 (44%)	16 (21%)
How many text messages (SMS) do you send per week?	1 (1%)	10 (13%)	13 (17%)	36 (47%)	17 (22%)

 

	Never	Every few years	Once a year	More than once a year
How often do you change your mobile phone number?	36 (47%)	29 (38%)	11 (14%)	1 (1%)

 

	Yes	No
Would you be interested in the REACh service?	77 (100%)	0 (0%)

 

	Standard	Smart	PDA	Don’t know
What type of mobile phone do you have?	61 (80%)	10 (13%)	3 (4%)	3 (4%)

 

	Yes	No	Don’t know
Does your mobile phone have internet access?	59 (77%)	17 (22%)	1 (1%)

 

Which of the following features do you regularly use on your phone?

 

Browsing the Internet	33 (43%)
Accessing emails	10 (13%)
Picture messaging	28 (36%)
Voice messaging	12 (16%)
Video messaging	5 (6%)
Sending SMS messages as emails	15 (19%)
Calendar	61 (79%)
Task manager	22 (29%)
Notes	27 (35%)
Podcasts	5 (6%)
Listening to music	46 (60%)
Other	19 (25%)

 

In what other ways do you use your mobile to aid your study?

 

• Calendar
• Text messaging
• Alarms
• Listening to recorded lectures
• Photographs
• Movie clips and video tutorials on YouTube
• Mobile PDF and Word
• Engineering calculator
• Telephone
• Accessing WebCT
• Task manager / scheduler

 

 

	Yes	No
Do you subscribe to text notification services?	15 (19%)	62 (81%)

 

	Yes	No	Don’t know
Have you ever subscribed to web feeds (RSS) on either your PC or your mobile? (n=76)	19 (25%)	42 (55%)	15 (20%)

 

Useful announcements via text or RSS?	This service would be useful
Timetable changes	76 (99%)
Assessment marks available	69 (90%)
Reminders of assessment deadlines	64 (83%)
Assessment details available	55 (71%)
Tutorial preparation tasks	54 (70%)
Other	36 (47%)
Additional resources available	34 (44%)
I wouldn’t find these useful	0 (0%)

 

Course announcements to mobile phone?	This service would be useful
Cancelled lectures	77 (100%)
Timetable changes	75 (97%)
Grades available	71 (92%)
Reminders of assessment deadlines	65 (84%)
Assessment details available	53 (69%)
Information on tutorial preparation tasks	42 (55%)
Additional resources available	27 (35%)

 

	WebCT announcements	WebCT other	Email	From the lecturer directly	From other students	Other	Don’t receive this info
Cancelled lectures	49	5	29	19	50	14	10
Reminders of assessment deadlines	27	24	4	46	37	5	6
Timetable changes	32	8	21	34	32	6	13
Assessment marks available	38	18	12	31	27	4	1
Assessment details available	32	15	9	48	23	2	5
Tutorial preparation tasks	15	18	1	52	18	8	11
Additional resources available	10	6	4	34	7	0	35

 

 

 

 

 

 

In accordance with our revised project plan, the REACh SMS and RSS services went live today, January 19.

An initial group of 40 students (from the target cohorts of computing, law and biological science) has supplied mobile numbers and are now receiving VLE announcements marked as URGENT. Survey feedback suggest that this will prove very useful for notification of room changes and release of assignment marks, and we hope the number of students trialling the SMS service will grow.

A personalised RSS feed of VLE annoucements has also launched today. We’ve had some initial glitches with server too busy to fulfill request (Error 503s), which the team are looking into, but so far things look very encouraging.

On November 13, I went down to Chelsea FC’s ground for an over-night programme meeting for all the projects funded under Rob’s Institutional Responses to Emerging Technology (IRET) Programme. Colleagues from NetSkills did a great job in facilitating a highly interactive event, which served its purpose in strengthening progamme community ties and lifted our focus from the immediacy of project concerns to the broader patterns underlying institutional responses to new technologies.

I made some subtle but important tweaks to my title slide in order to link the presentation about REACh with the wider picture of institutional responses. The tweaks were as follows:

1. Emphasising that REACh was JISC-funded - part of MMU’s response to new learning technologies is to seek external funding for trying them out and then form or join a community in which experiences of that technology can be shared
2. Emphasising that REACh is classified as an “experiment” - MMU’s Director of Learning and Research Information Services (Dr Phil Range) has proposed a simple structure for interpreting technology activity involving experiments, pilots and production systems, which is gaining acceptance within the university as a way of appreciating the trajectory that new technologies might follow and the decision points along the way
3. Including my new role and title on the slide and explaining that MMU’s new Learning and Research Technology department had a specific remit of interpreting, developing and evaluating emerging technologies, and was thus an integral, structural part of the institution’s response

After looking at the delays to getting the live system up (hasta la vista), Nic and I have come up with a plan for the research. The delays have presented a new opportunity for some pre-surveys of the student population to try to gauge their atitude to using SMS and RSS in the ways REACh proposes. This could lead to a richer piece of research in having a ‘before and after’ picture - serendipity of course! The rest of this message contains our outline research strategy and the draft pre-survey. We would be interested in any feedback on the survey from other JISC project groups as there could be others asking similar questions.

REACh Evaluation Plan

The research design of the evaluation of the REACh project aims to use a number of different qualitative and quantitative methods in order to triangulate the findings. There are five areas of evaluation that the evaluation team plan to undertake.

The aims of the evaluation are to:

• inform the implementation of the REACh project;
• provide evidence of the impact of the project;
• highlight lessons learned from the project;
• analyse the sustainability of the REACh implementation model.

User needs survey

A baseline survey will be undertaken with all students from the three participating subject areas. This will be administered online during November and December 2008 as a way of analysing current student access to technology, acceptability of the project to the student groups, and student preferences for the types of information received. Descriptive statistics will be generated and a comparative analysis undertaken across the three disciplines.

Analysis of system data

A variety of existing system data will be used at the end of the project to provide quantitative data on student and staff usage of the system. Three areas of system data will be used:

· analysis of numbers of students registering for the system and subsequent withdrawals both for SMS and RSS;

· analysis of the numbers of messages sent over the trial period and categorisation by content across the three disciplines.

Evaluative questionnaire

At the end of the project a second questionnaire will be administered in a similar fashion to the user needs survey, with students in all three participating disciplines. This will focus on the student experience of the REACh project, the impact of the information received on students, and potential improvements to the system. The following questions will be addressed:

• How appropriate was the timing and content of messages sent?
• How acceptable were the numbers of messages sent?
• To what degree were rss feeds used?
• Were there any technical issues that can be identified?
• In what ways could the system be improved both technologically and administratively?

Focus groups

While the evaluative questionnaire focuses on large-scale predominantly quantitative data collection, focus groups will be used to complement the questionnaire findings and provide more in-depth data on student preferences and their experiences of REACh. Two focus groups will be carried out in each subject area (six groups in total) with three students in each group.

Sustainability evaluation

The overwhelming majority of mobile learning research focuses on the impact of the technology on students. However there is widespread evidence of issues in embedding the use of mobile technologies within universities, largely steeped in fixed point computer access and wedded to a transmission style model of teaching and learning (Bird and Stubbs, 2008[i]). This area of the evaluation aims to address how the technology will get the support it needs from various groups within the university organisation and be sustained after the REACh funding has run out.

A number of interviews will be conducted to establish what the issues are and what practices are in play. Interviews will be conducted in the following areas:

• Lecturers using REACh and their department managers to understand the level of support both in principle (i.e. attitudes towards the concept of REACh) and in practice (i.e. budgeting for the ongoing service)
• Interviews with IT services management to see how they will sustain technical support for REACh
• Interviews with university finance to see how they can practically charge departments for text messaging services.
• Interview with SMS providers on models of charging for university usage.
• Interview with central teaching and learning to understand their strategy for promoting REACH across all faculties not just those in the trial.

Apart from the specific findings on REACh and its sustainability within MMU, it is hoped that the findings could be shared through JISC so that other mobile learning projects can benefit from good practice.

Nicola Whitton and Peter Bird, November 2008

We’ve written to Rob at JISC asking if we can delay our trial of the RSS and SMS feeds until next term, as our institutional VLE has been struggling to cope with massively increased demands placed upon it this academic year - our VLE website moved over over a Terrabyte of network traffic in the first 3 weeks of October as our regular student user base climbed from 14,000 to 21,000! The bottom line is that our VLE is now a critical piece of infrastructure and we simply daren’t hang anything else off the back of it until we’ve got to the bottom of the load-related performance and stabiliy issues that our production system has been experiencing.

This delay in deployment gives us some interesting opportunities and the REACh team is meeting next week to see which of these we’d be able to exploit in a revised project plan. Current favourites are a more in-depth pre-intervention survey of users’ devices, ways of working and their needs, preferences for administrative information; and a wider survey of SMS APIs to inform e-Framework developments. If JISC are happy with the revised timeframe we’re confident our deliverables will be stronger.

With the whole team raring to go, it’s disappointing that we are not making posts right now with interim findings, but we’re all agreed that we don’t want to explore what’s possible in theory; we want to see how students respond to emerging admin channels when they carry real data about room changes, marks availability and the like. Load continues to climb but the good news is that we’re starting to see improvements in the responsiveness and stability of our VLE.

Looking forward to sharing more soon…

I am unconventional to say the least. But i get results. We have reached the point where rolling out the service is possible so we can start playing with it.

As always this is never a smooth move. The REACh service is being built in java EE servlets and JSP pages.

The system will make use of cron jobs to automate its activation. and then a core servlet to control the logic. While a JSP intergrated XML page feeds the RSS.  These servlets and page sinteract with WebCT backend Oracle database and a mysql database of our creation to manage, log and feed the service.

As mentiond previuosly two ideas were develope dfor the database this as now coem down to one for its adaptability and further sue and also ease of update.

the basic databse schema will record all users, then altr there state of opt in. It will recor dall their learning modules. Then it will store RSS information for all these modules on a per module basis. The databas ewill then feed the RSS with use of a web stat programme to monitor the rss usage. A logging system for the sms is in development but is part of the MySQL databse.

The actual service its self. is a servlet that scrapes the WebCT database using time stamp information that is prolific in WebCT to shorten queries. This servlet updates the MySQL database. A second servlet is used on request to send SMS service calls. JSP embeded XML pages serve up the rss based upon student IDs. One page with variable handling.

I’ll try do some more UML for the system this week and the databas efor interested parties to look at.

Any way the role out. On first attempt it all went wrong ebvery little niggle on teh development server and WebCT just did not play ball. No one to blame just mr Murphy and is incorpreal law getting involved in development.

 

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