A growing population of higher-ed students now depend upon mobile apps for communication, entertainment, studies, banking, transportation, and more. Although most of the universities try to develop mobile apps focusing beyond traditional methodologies, they do not take student engagement into consideration. Their strategies are centered on fulfilling student needs only. This gap between fulfilling student needs and engaging them gives rise to lack of student participation over time.

Today, millennials are increasingly using smartphones and tablets, which has driven several universities around the world to use mobile campus solutions. Researchers believe that developing campus apps which are not aligned to student engagement strategies are not worth an institution’s time and money.

When an institution puts all the components in mobile apps, it can engage students, promote student participation and overall academic success.

If an institution is unable to define an effective mobile strategy, it will be responsible for lack of student engagement. So, it is imperative to have an effective mobile strategy.

For institutions lacking sufficient technical resources, developing an effective student engagement mobile strategy is challenging. Furthermore, the idea of investing less on campus technologies hinders the paths to student engagement through mobile apps. As more students are relying on mobile campus apps nowadays, an institution must focus on improving its mobile campus strategy.

Yahoo’s Flurry Analytics is evidence that more than 90% of young adults in the US spend time on apps rather than mobile browsers. Therefore, understanding student needs is necessary while building efficient student engagement mobile apps. Higher education institutions need to build mobile apps which not only boost student engagement but also support the institution’s long-term goals.

Keeping these needs in mind, I-Made focuses on building student engagement mobile apps with the following strategies:

• User-friendly Interface – All the apps developed for student engagement feature an intuitive and user-friendly interface which enables students to get quick access to important resources.
• Seamless Integration – I-Made provides seamless integration with the institution’s SIS and LMS through the backend systems to pull relevant information and present it to the students.
• Student Engagement – Student life gets easier through easy-to-use interface and icons. In addition to that, push notifications, easy access to assignments, one-tap attendance entry, student dashboard with all updates, chat features, campus safety, and one-click access to multiple apps facilitate student engagement and participation.
• Quality Experience – Apart from making student life on campus easy, I-Made apps are a one-stop solution to several student problems. They can check assignments, grades, calendars, news, maps, and get information on upcoming events and important campus information.
• Customization and Branding – Every institution has its own color theme and logo, which they prefer to incorporate into their mobile app. The I-Made Studio provides prebuilt themes to enable the users to customize apps that go with the institution’s brand. You can choose the colors, themes, icons, and modules which support your institution’s image and create an app without using a single line of code.

Student engagement is an essential factor of a higher education institution’s success and blending it with mobile apps paves way for sure-shot positive results. To engage students with mobile apps, nowadays a growing number of institutions are stepping forward to adopt mobile app platforms.

To learn more about the practical applications of Mobile Digital Campus, Register for the iSeminar on how I-Made helps leading universities across the globe to develop apps for campus management.