Advertisement

Manage your Seton Hall University Education with SHUMobile

Seton Hall University (located in New Jersey) and Blackboard have developed the SHUMobile (free) app for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. It's also available for Blackberry, Android, and Nokia devices. SHUMobile provides a student portal to a wide variety of what Seton Hall has to offer. In effect, it's one stop shopping for managing your education. The app is quite well designed and provides eight categories at present, including:

  • A searchable phone directory

  • Athletics, which allows you to drill down to each sport and break them into men's and women's teams, with a scrolling list of stories about each. Also provided are options to search for game schedules and scores.

  • Listings of events of the day, which are broken down into the following categories: Academic, Athletics, Campus Tours, Conferences, Exhibits, Film, Lectures and Readings, Performances, Receptions, Religious, Student Government, and Workshops. A daily listing is provided along with an easy way to move forward or back by a day. Choosing one brings up a screen with specific information on that event.

  • A pinch and stretch campus map that uses GPS to locate your position on campus

  • A scrolling list of videos

  • Seton Hall news (broken into categories)

  • A searchable listing of 250 images of people and campus life

  • The entire course catalog, which drills down to times, dates, instructors, and location



In my testing, I found some problems with the app. Choosing an image from a thumbnail listing either brings up a black screen or crashes the app entirely, and watching videos on an iPad gives you no way to get back to the menu when the video is done. There is also information missing from the app, such as course descriptions. I have no doubt that this will be fixed in the near future since the idea is just too good not to get perfect. Blackboard also has a huge number of client Colleges and Universities that I am sure would be interested in giving this functionality to their students. The next version will contain authentication so that students can add or drop courses right from the app. Also planned are access to University Libraries, educational databases, and a way to interact with specific Blackboard enhanced courses.

This app, though not yet perfect, has so much potential it's mind boggling. Having been both a student and a teacher, I would have killed for this amount of information in my pocket without having to pore over course catalogs or dig for information on often arcane websites. The beauty of it is in the organization of the interface. It's clean, clear, and it allows a student get to anything in a matter of seconds. If your school is now using the Blackboard Course Management System and is fairly well-heeled (Blackboard is far from cheap), you might want to nudge your administration about this sort of thing.