Mobile

Santa Monica College Reaching Students with Mobile

• By Rhea Kelly
• 10/19/17

Santa Monica College is turning to mobile tech to get its students' attention — and ultimately boost enrolment and degree completion. The California community college partnered with Modo Labs to deploy a mobile app and communicate with students on their preferred platform: the mobile phone.

"Traditional communication methods weren't effectively reaching students — e-mails were going unread, creating an inbox full of soon-to-be irrelevant information. Today's student expects to be reached on mobile," noted Esau Tovar, dean of enrollment services at the college, in a statement. "We were immediately impressed by the modern and flexible interface, robust communication platform, and ease of management offered by Modo Campus."

The Modo Campus platform is designed to provide a "scalable, highly personalized, engaging, mobile experience to diverse student bodies, visitors, alumni and applicants, according to the company. Students can access the college course catalog, register for classes, view their class schedule and more, all from a mobile phone.

In its first few weeks, Santa Monica College's app was downloaded 12,000 times, according to a news announcement. Based on user feedback, the institution has planned a number of improvements, including adding campus maps, financial aid deadlines and full integration with the academic portal.

"In the next year, we'll be promoting campus events with special event modules, which you can easily switch based on institutional needs, and also getting more departments, like career services, involved," said Tovar. "The app has already been hugely successful and we're excited to continue enhancing our mobile offerings with the critical information that students are looking for."