Abstract:

Smartphone usage by students has increased rapidly over the last number of years, and research points to an expectation for increased utilisation of mobile applications in third level educational environments.

First year students have particular needs when they transition to third level as they can experience a number of personal, social and cultural difficulties. Orientation is a critical stage for these students and we found that the earlier students have access to important orientation information the less stress the initial stages of college were for them.

At the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT), we designed a bespoke mobile application tailored to the particular orientation and information needs of first year students undertaking programmes in the DIT’s School of Hospitality Management & Tourism. The aim of the mobile app was to engage and orientate the students to their programme before they arrived on campus, and contained key information such as college floor maps and campus locations, contact details, tutorials, reference material and social media links. This mobile app – entitled “DIT GetSmart!” - was released on Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store in August 2015 for free download by all new first year students joining the DIT’s School of Hospitality & Tourism undergraduate programmes.

Mobile applications of this nature would generally require substantial financial investment and technological expertise. We utilised online ‘Hybrid App Development’ platforms that are a low cost model requiring little or no programming know-how to produce and deploy quality mobile applications on Android and Apple smartphones and tablets in just a matter of weeks. We evaluated the success of the app through student feedback and the app usage analytics.

Keywords:

Mobile Apps, Orientation, Engagement, First Year Experience, Retention.