Released in mid-November, Salt Lake Community College’s free mobile app is intended to make life easier for students and teachers.
Ellucian, the same company that provides the banner software for SLCC, powers and provides the framework for the mobile app. This framework made it easy for inputting access to class schedules, grades, holds and Bruinmail. Teachers can check their class rosters, and developers added other features, such as maps and a staff directory.
SLCC Chief Information Officer Bill Zoumadakis was in charge of the project, which started in late June.
“The school has wanted mobility for a long time, we just hadn’t found anything. We were looking for a starting point, and this [Ellucian] was a great starting point for us. I don’t think by any means it’s the end – we want to build upon it,” says Zoumadakis.
Zoumadakis met with student leadership throughout the process to see what features students wanted. Developers then configured these features into the app.
“Sam [Kuhn] and Brandon [Johnson] were really architecting what I brought back from a lot of meetings, and what they heard from a lot of folks,” says Zoumadakis. “They had a tremendous amount of effort in it as well – getting the thing put together and making it look good.”
Some users of the app have posted feedback on SLCC’s Facebook page.
“Everyone that’s used it really liked it. All the feedback has been really positive,” says Kuhn.
The team will continue to work on the app configuring additional features.
“This is our first step towards mobility, but there [are] a lot of things we’re looking at doing with this mobile app,” says Zoumadakis. “We’re hoping that we can get registration and wait-listing in there is our hope – we think that would be a real benefit to students.”
Zoumadakis planned to have both features in by the start of the spring semester 2014. Single sign-on, which would make it so that students are automatically logged in to their MyPage account when logging into the app, is also a goal.
