Mobile Computing
U San Diego Deploys Intelligent To-Do App for Students
The University of San Diego (USD) has
launched Insight, a to-do app designed to help students stay organized in their
personal and academic lives and plan for the future.
USD custom built Insight on the iOS platform with the goal of making it
easier for students to manage their long to-do lists and busy schedules, right
on their smartphone. The app synchronizes with USD class schedules and
automatically creates categories based on the student's class schedule. At the
end of class students receive a push notification to enter any new assignments
in their to-do list, and their tasks and class schedule are color-coded to make
it easier for them to identify their course obligations at a glance. The app
also uses color-coded reminders, push notifications, badge notifications and
task alerts designed to help keep the students on track.
In addition to managing tasks and schedules, Insight also identifies patterns
intended to help the student make decisions about their academic and career
paths. Students can use the information to find correlations between the tasks
entered, tasks completed and their final grades.
"Ultimately, we'd like to make it easier for students to analyze their past
schedules to determine what they are spending most of their time and energy on,
and how this might suggest a path for their future," aid Avi Badwal, senior
director of enterprise technologies at USD, in a prepared statement. "Our hope
is that the more in sync their academic, social and personal lives are, the more
successful our students will be because they will be able to use the feedback
generated by Insight to make decisions."
In upcoming releases, the development team plans to add time-tracking,
emotion-tracking, expanded synchronization and the ability to share tasks and
opportunities between students.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].
