Let's Talk about Text - Conference Report

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Introduction

The conference had a mixture of speakers from FE and HE talking about their implementation of SMS (and other technologies using mobile ‘phones), along with some more marketing-focussed presentations from Edutxt (the suppliers of a UK-based SMS product).

A number of institutions (including Aberdeen University, University of East London, and the University of Bath) have successfully used SMS for a variety of purposes including:

• Attendance management
• Delivery of educational simulations
• Retention of late arriving students

Using SMS to communicate with students raises a range of questions, both around the practicalities and the ‘ethics’/policies.

Issues raised

 Some basic considerations would be:

• What % of our students own a mobile phone? (A number of sets of statistics were mentioned but all put ownership in the UK at above 90%).
• What % of students would be willing to give us that number?

It was noted that students are more likely to buy into a SMS service if they perceive a benefit – just using it to chase unpaid fines etc is not likely to engage them. There is also a difference between engaging with at University level (for e-administration), and a module-level where SMS may be used for learning and teaching activities.

SMS in learning and teaching has great potential and those projects demonstrated at the conference showed innovative and engaging use within the curriculum. As with all uses of SMS consideration needs to be given to issues of equal access to ensure that students are not disadvantaged if they don’t have a mobile phone, can’t afford to pay the bills etc. This is a particular issue if students would be required to view or download content on their ‘phones as part of their courses.

Staff wishing to use SMS as part of their teaching would initially need a good deal of support and early adopters would be best advised to work on a project basis with staff from Information Services. The Edutxt service provides a plug-in to Blackboard (using the Building Block system), which ties the messaging element to the members of a Blackboard course. Aberdeen University and the University of Bath have both undertaken projects which focus on SMS in learning and teaching contexts, and these would be good initial contacts for further discussions.

When implementing SMS (either for admin or teaching) a number of issues should be addressed:

• Clearly defining the occasions on which SMS would be sent. This would ensure that students (and potentially staff) know what they are signing up for, and that it won’t be used for things that might be perceived as ‘spam’. This will also be an issue were the system to develop significantly – there is potentially a situation where students could receive messages from the university, their department/s, and individual modules. This may be considered to be SMS overload by some.
• Who sends the texts – staff/students would need to know who would send the message and that it came from a verifiable number. This would ensure that they could trust that the message was from their tutor or department and not a spoof.
• The issue of Welsh Language messages would need to be addressed – as SMS messages can only contain 160 characters (including spaces) it would not be feasible to send bi-lingual messages. Therefore, any system would need to tie in with the user language preference as held by the University. There would also be issues about the use of special characters in messages. The Welsh Language Board's Tecstio project (see and ) might be of interest.

Conclusion

My conclusions, based on the presentations given and my reflections on the day, are that using of SMS in requires careful consideration, including an understanding of its limitations. Using SMS in any context would need to have a clearly defined purpose, and those using it would need to balance its benefits with the risks of disadvantaging those users who can’t or won’t engage with it. However, its potential is certainly worth investigatin, particularly given the growing use of SMS in schools and the widespread use of mobile phones.