Pace for Mobile Apps on Campus Quickens

College students are going mobile, according to the Student Monitor 2010 spring survey of full-time undergraduate students at four-year colleges, which reports 98% of students have cellphones and nearly half of those phones are smartphones. Campuses are still in the catch-up mode with mobile applications, but the strides are getting quicker.

The 2010 Campus Computing Survey shows that an eighth of the campuses participating in the report have already launched a mobile learning management system (LMS) application. Another 10% are scheduled to have one before the end of the current academic year and nearly 25% of the institutions are starting to think about offering mobile apps.

“The campus interest in and movement to mobile apps reflects trends in the consumer market,” Kenneth C. Green, founding director of The Campus Computing Project, said in the report. “Students expect their institutions to provide the kinds of resources and services they experience and enjoy as consumers. Mobile apps provide online access to instructional resources and campus services from the buttons on your smartphone.”

The Campus Computing Survey also reveals that IT officers on campus are coming around to accepting e-books as the wave of the future. Over four-fifths of respondents (86.5%) agree or strongly agree that “e-book content will be an important source for instructional resources in five years.” In addition, 78.6% agree that e-book readers will become important in classrooms for instructional content in five years.

E-textbook continues to lag behind used textbook titles because of development and pricing strategies for most students. But as the pace of mobile apps development accelerates, more and more students become accustomed to using them and provides a very promising future for the technology, according to Green.