“What’s Up?”. The Application is Up and Running!

In the latest technical seminar at the UOC (conferences are held, usually the last Friday of every month), we presented the results of the launch of the pilot with students of the Degree of Multimedia.
Then, we leave the presentation’s transcription made by Arantxa Hernandez:

“I would just like to explain the launch of the “What’s Up?” application in the UOC Campus.

As you know, the goal of this project is to facilitate communication within the Campus, using a tool like Twitter, where users can type their status or mood.

The project began in 2010 and these are some of the technologies we used to make the application.

I’m very grateful to those people who worked on it at the beginning: Irene with its design, Pablo with the user tests, Jose with development. Without them, the rest of the work would not have been possible.
Finally, this year, Pepe, Gladys and Jose again, have helped me a lot.

The work of these people has been very important and vital for the success of this project.

I began to work on this project around March this year as Project Manager and my work has been to improve the HTML code for standards and accessibility. It was also important to review and coordinate the bugs through the JIRA tool and this was made possible by the participation in the previous pilot test.

The “What’s Up?” App has just been launched on Nov 30th.

The adoption of our Multimedia Degree students to this App has been spectacular. Around 90% of students have tested the application.

In just the first three hours, there were 70 messages from students and in only one week, we have had over 400 messages.

We are receiving a lot of feedback, mostly positive and, obviously some recommendations.

Generally, students have congratulated us. They have said: “It is a great idea to permit easy communication with other students”. And, this is the principal objective of this project!

One of the suggestions is to group students according to their classroom, or type of studies and subject.
Another suggestion is in line with the same ideas that we are planning to deploy which is an account of new messages in real time.

I promise that we will study all the suggestions, so the future of the tool will be: “A lot of Coffee” and improve the application!

To finish, I would like to thank, above all, the collaboration and cooperation of all the Multimedia Degree teachers. (Antoni Marín Amatller, Carlos Casado Martinez, Josep Prieto Blázquez, Roser Beneito Montagut, Laura Porta Simó, Ferran Giménez Prado, Javier Melenchón Maldonado, Laia Blasco Soplon, Quelic Berga Carreras and César Pablo Córcoles Briongos).

And always, with the assistance of Laura Castillo of “Informació a l’estudiant”, who has been interested in testing the tool and encouraging consultants and students to use it.

This short presentation is above all, a message of thanks to all of them.

The UOC Virtual Campus is already accessible from mobile devices. This new achievement was presented last October to the Spanish and Catalan media and it entails a great breakthrough for our users. Indeed, students, professors and  other members from UOC can now log into the campus homepage via any mobile device. The mobile version provides access to the homepage, the virtual classrooms and other private areas of the main campus, facilitating users to check their mail, activity in their classrooms, calendar, community forums and many other widgets without a computer but just their mobiles -you would find more information here.

What are you waiting for?  Be mobile and get connected to the mobile UOC Campus.

MiniBustia is an android Client that connects to your UOC’s mailbox. Its essential operations allow users to read, write, and answer messages in an Android mobile, anywhere, anyplace and at anytime.
While developing this app, we faced different problems such as  screen size, different models and versions of the Operating System or speed limitations (3G or HPDA form connection is much slower than a Net connection). The way we overcame these restrictions when modeling were:

• At the implementation, a mix strategy was used. This was a native source Android for making a list of folders -using Web Service (SOAP)- and direct web call for message reading.
• Also, several options of Android as Menu, use the bottons were also employed.

When finishing this project, your mobile device will have the same capacity as that of the UOC Mailbox; a great application for a product so small!

The MinBustia application will be deployed as BETA at the begining of 2012.

What’s Up? is a microblogging application developed by the iCommunity team of the Office of Learning Tecnologies (lt.uoc.edu) from UOC.

This tool works within the UOC virtual campus and aims to promote communication among members of the UOC community.

What’s Up? can also be synchronized with your personal Twitter account so that you don´t need any longer to maintain your status in more than one social network.

You can see the video of the tool, presented by Arantxa Hernández, here:

We started our Twitter account!

From now on, you can follow us at @UOCicommunity and you can have with us a more direct contact, more human!

Catch up on our work, our day to day.

Feel free to ask and say, we are there to share with you the news and answer your questions.

Enjoy it!