Most, if not all, college students own a smartphone, which they use for school, work, and entertainment. With average daily mobile phone use as high as 10 hours, you’d be hard-pressed to find a student who doesn’t feel their phone is essential to their everyday life.
As such, universities wanting to engage students and elevate their experience must adopt mobile app technology. Campus portals are a dying technology, and today’s students want and expect to use a native mobile app to navigate campus life.
In a recent webinar, Northern Arizona University (NAU) shared its campus app development journey and how they have incorporated student feedback to drive enhancements and changes to the app since launching in the summer of 2019. Like hundreds of schools nationwide, NAU uses PeopleSoft’s campus solution. Unfortunately, the system is not mobile-friendly, which causes a lot of frustration for students forced to use the system’s native applications.
“Students were actually getting onto a desktop computer, opening up their schedule in PeopleSoft, taking a photograph of the screen with their phone, and then that’s what they were carrying around with them as their schedule,” shared Patty Allenbaugh, Senior UX/UI Analyst and LOUIEgo Development Team Lead at NAU. “We knew we could do something better.”
Like all modern universities, NAU recognized a need to create a student experience exclusively for mobile and had adopted a mission for its IT services group to use technology to meet students where they are.
“A mobile app is pivotal when it comes to student engagement and success and familiarizing students with campus life,” said Allenbaugh.
Integrating PeopleSoft was essential, given feedback from students that they wanted the app to include their course schedule, balance, holds, and course details.
Using Modo Campus as their digital engagement platform, NAU’s small, student-powered development team quickly built a beautiful, custom app for the school integrating PeopleSoft using Modo’s out-of-the-box APIs. Students can access lists, holds, registration status, grades, financial balances, class schedules, and more through the campus app. Access is also available to NAU students via a desktop, replacing PeopleSoft’s clunky UI.
Currently, the team is working on integrating PeopleSoft SIS to allow students to enroll, drop and swap classes through the LOUIEgo app. This is happening alongside a Canvas integration to bring all coursework and grade information into the app.
In the webinar, Modo’s Robert Ratway went through a live demo of PeopleSoft capabilities showcasing how PeopleSoft works inside Modo-powered apps to deliver a ‘connected’ experience.
Unlike other solutions, the Modo-powered integration captures and preserves a school’s PeopleSoft business logic. It also provides a 3X performance improvement over other API-based PeopleSoft integrations and fluid interactions with other in-app modules, e.g., map to a class location or the ability to embed PeopleSoft links within notifications.
Modo Campus APIs will also work with the PeopleSoft classic and fluid experience. For PeopleSoft Fluid users, Modo will pull in all your system configurations, allowing you to decide which views to show on your mobile app.