Mar
17
Video demonstrating REACh now available!
March 17, 2009 |
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.
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