App helps with advising

Fox School of Business launched the first version of its mobile application to students last February, and in January, an update was released, upgrading features.

The update gives users the ability to schedule advising appointments, and create and manage reservations for breakout rooms at Alter Hall.

“It’s more mobile in the sense that normal apps, you know the ones that you get for your iPhone or Android device, every update comes through you get the little update on and you have to press the icon to update,” Josh Sankey, a senior web developer, said. “We don’t have to that with ours, we can actually update the app because it lives on a little Web server here.”

So far, the app has been very well received and has gotten many compliments through social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook, Sankey said.

This makes it a little more unique than other apps, Sankey said. If there was a misspelling somewhere within the application, it could easily be fixed instead of pushing out a new release to students.

Sankey added that he always finds it annoying when he finds an application that requires a constant update and wanted to avoid such a thing with this mobile application.

“We had a lot of student input as far as what features that they would like to see,” he said. “The difference between 1.0 and 2.0, the biggest is probably the breakout room reservations and the book and advising appointments, which were two requested features that we added in 2.0.”

With the breakout room feature, students can reserve and schedule a room from whatever time they may need it for from the mobile application instead of having to be in front of a computer.

“The other part was the advising appointments,” Sankey said. “It was something our advising department was begging for. They get flooded with these things and they get a lot of phone calls and they wanted to try and put some of that stuff online so they could fit it into their schedule.”

Students can log in with their university credentials and can select an adviser. The application will automatically detect if the student is a graduate or undergraduate and the student can pick out of a list of advisers. The application also shows dates and available times.

The mobile application is not connected to Blackboard, Sankey said. When developing the application, he said one of the goals was not to duplicate things that Temple’s mobile application already had.

“We kind of figured there was no need for us to reinvent that. We just focused on what internally would be useful to us,” he said. “Something we would like to implement going forward, would be almost like a GPS- type map that’s something that’s coming down the line, something that was requested.”

Dominique Johnson can be reached at dominique.johnson@temple.edu.