Empowering Students with On-the-Go Mobile Experiences
With outdated and cumbersome mobile portal solutions, higher ed faces the challenge of adoption, notification fatigue and governance. Aenea Clark, Digital Operations Coordinator at Augusta University, Chris Brezil, Interim Vice President/CIO at The New School, and Steve Read, Senior Web Developer at Central College, leveraged Pathify to replace antiquated solutions and offer a one-stop-shop for critical information across any device.
Obsolete Solutions
The New School previously leveraged Ellucian Luminis’ web-based portal and CampusM’s mobile app to inform and engage their students. Hosting and managing information across two instances became overwhelming, reflected Brezil. “It was a lot of additional IT development and involvement having separate web and mobile platforms.”
Augusta University used ModoLabs before transitioning to Pathify. “One of the reasons we moved to Pathify was the customization the platform offers,” Clark said. “We loved that it had mobile and web parity, our previous app was just a link farm.”
At Central College, Pathify replaced Ready Education’s mobile app and a SharePoint web portal. “We had to make updates across both Ready and SharePoint,” Read said, acknowledging the management of two disparate systems as clunky and inefficient. “When I saw Pathify, I was like ‘that’s the solution we need.’”
Meeting Students Where They Are
Brezil emphasized the impact of mobile devices, “We live with our phones today so the ability to extend that usefulness out to students, is critical.” Brezil added, “We’re one of the country’s premier art and design schools — we teach UX at a high level at The New School…a single interface is important [to the student experience].”
“Pathify makes it easy to plug in brand colors or customize branding, so it’s consistent across all devices,” noted Clark. At Augusta University, students personalize their dashboards, move widgets around and hide widgets. For Clark, “It just makes it the ultimate student experience.”
Clark also configured widgets to support shuttle and bus tracking. She observed, “Before transitioning to Pathify, students had to go to the Passio GO! app to book a shuttle, but with the integration into Pathify, students book their shuttle via our portal, JagMobile.”
Driving Adoption
During the transition from CampusM to Pathify, Brezil considered communication and notification fatigue. “Communicating with students is a massive challenge. We want to be very careful with how often we send announcements,” Brezil said. Clark emphasized strict governance around notifications and announcements providing much-needed clarity and structure. “The last thing students want are uninteresting and not applicable messages,” Clark added.
Clark encouraged involving the right people to drive mobile app adoption and engagement. “Get as many stakeholders involved in transitioning mobile apps to get the adoption rate to increase and people to use the platform. Be patient, practice open communication, do research,” Clark advised.
Key Takeaways
As a true game-changer, Pathify brings institutions upward and onward with consistent, paired student communication across all devices. Despite having a year left on their Ready Education contract, Central College chose to partner with Pathify and the experience outshines previous solutions and customer support. Read contemplated, “We’re moving out of the 1990s and into the twenty-first century. We were impressed with the way Pathify works, the way it looks, its functionality. Two thumbs up.”
Concluded Brezil, “Students are really happy with Pathify. We’re excited about the new things we develop and the simplicity of doing that. Engagement has been way better than it was with our prior platforms.”
Want to learn more about Pathify’s paired web and mobile experience? Watch the recording for a closer look.
