Sage Kiernan-Sherrow | News Editor
Through the new MyWOU mobile app, Western’s students now have a way to carry campus with them wherever they go. As of now, approximately 1,200 students have downloaded the app, with 990 of them using the app through iOS and the rest through Android.
Director of University Computing Solutions Bill Kernan, and Web, Mobile and Systems Programmer Tony Manso are two of the people responsible for cultivating and modifying the app to give it that “Western look.”
“The idea actually started maybe 2 and a half years ago … Elucian, the provider of Banner, approached Western, Southern, Eastern and OIT and asked if we were interested in a mobile app and I said ‘we are,’” Kernan said.
MyWOU functions much like portal — students can find all of the information on portal built into the app but Kernan said, “the current portal isn’t responsive, so we are in the initial planning stages for portal 3.0 … MyWOU isn’t ever going to be a replacement for portal, but will hopefully work in a similar fashion.”
However, unlike portal, MyWOU is customizable, more accessible for daily use and has a few unique features currently in development.
One “cool feature is College Scheduler … (a) mobile app to do planning with. You can put your schedule in and then say ‘I want to take these types of classes’ and then it will fill it all out so you can use that when you apply for classes,” Kernan commented. That will be linked into the MyWOU app within the coming months.
“We also have the campus map,” Manso added, “since it’s running on a mobile device, the device has GPS capability, so we could actually do things according to your location on campus, so as soon as somebody comes up with a reason to do that, we will probably have that functionality on the app.” This function could serve to give students information about events being held in different buildings on campus, or interesting fun facts about the art and architecture of Western. It’s like Pokemon Go, but for learning about the campus.
The biggest feature that has already been implemented, however, is notifications.
“It’s really hard to get ahold of students because it seems like the current generation of traditional students that are in college don’t use email much anymore, they use social media more,” Kernan said, “we’re thinking this is one more communication tool to get information out to students in a timely manner, such as reminders that it’s time to see your advisors.”
However, MyWOU is still in its early stages of development.
“We’re hoping it can be a tool for success,” Kernan said, but “if students have feedback about the usability or additional functionality they’d like to see … we’ll take it to that subcommittee in UTAC and we can go from there.”
Manso concurred, “there’s a lot of possibilities … once the students get ahold of it, we need to learn from them, what they want to see it do and let them define it from there.”
For students interested in providing feedback, contact Tony Manso at monsot@wou.edu.
Contact the author at howlnews@wou.edu
Photo by Sage Kiernan-Sherrow
