One of the topics that keeps coming back when I meet my CIO colleagues is “why are you still doing app development?” The rationale is that it is unsustainable and that there are much cheaper alternatives, so it doesn’t make sense. I have a different view point and I am sure that the Wellesley community members will agree that what we have been able to do in the past few years have been tremendously helpful to them. I briefly want to describe the rationale and provide two of the most recent examples though we have a lot I can talk about…

We are pretty strategic about choosing to write an app. By the way we are not talking about Mobile app, but just a plain old web app. We get requests, or more often, we generate ideas that result in an app. The process is to ask the faculty member of staff interested in an app to put in a request and we evaluate whether an app exists out in the world that will satisfy the request and whether it is something that we can support. If it does, we get the cost estimate. If it doesn’t exist or if we feel we can build it cheaper, we will do it. We always go into it as “forever beta”, meaning, “don’t expect a completed product, but we will incrementally add features” and are also not afraid to toss it out if an alternative emerges after a few years. We have adopted bootstrap, so our apps are reasonably responsive. Simple, right?

I would estimate that we have over 200 little apps that we have built over the past 6 years. A couple of them run once a year and have completed their 6th run. We have apps for two of our major annual conferences, Tanner and Ruhlman. We also built our own waitlist application outside Banner. Our course browser and directory are other examples. We have several administrative support apps such as one for faculty awards, one for faculty leave request and until we moved to Workday, we had an Open Enrollment app that we built.  All of these apps rely on a common set of code that allows us to interact with Banner and MySQL databases and written in a way that it is easily supportable by any one of us who do web application development (right, I am a developer too!).

At Wellesley, we allow for self scheduled exams. Faculty indicate whether their courses offer self scheduled exams (You got it, through an exam preferences web app!). Students enrolled in these courses are them free to walk into the science center at self scheduled exam times, pick up the exam, go finish it within the specified time and return them. The exam preferences app actually produced a sheet for every student (with her ID photo)  for every class that has a self scheduled exam. The Registrar’s office received exams stuffed in envelopes from the academic departments and attached the sheet and order them by the last name of student. Student would walk in, give her ID and say which exam she wants to take and one of the staff (we used to hire temp workers for this)  would pick up the exam and hand it over, write down the time and tell the student the time when she should return. When the student returned, that time was noted manually. Then, either the faculty or the admin assistant would walk over to the science center periodically to go check if exams have been turned in, so they can pick up. Many a times, this resulted in several trips. Better for health, but an annoyance!  I have simplified some of the steps. Basically, a lot of manual work. We thought we could do much better.

We brainstormed and developed an app for this. Basically, at the exam center, we have card readers. The student walks in and swipes the card. Her photo shows up on the screen and the exams that she can take (if she has already taken an exam, that is marked) show up. If there are multiple exams, the student tells which one. The staff member picks up the exam and hands it over to the student. The computer shows the time picked up and time to return. When the student returns, she swipes the card and the return time is recorded. All good and you may think that this is marginal efficiency. Wait, what I haven’t told you are the additional efficiencies. The faculty members and admin assistants can see in real time how many exams have been checked out and how many have been returned. This way they can plan when to come down and pick up, which is also noted in the app, I believe.

Another one that I want to give as an example is something that is brand new which will be rolled out soon. It is about religious observances. When we received a PDF of religious holiday, we reached out to the Dean of Religious and Spiritual Life and said can we make it a shared Google Calendar so that the students and faculty can add specific dates to their personal calendars? During that conversation, we found a great opportunity to help our students and faculty.

In short, the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life will maintain multiple Religious Observance calendar for a variety of religions. We have an app that picks up these events and the students can choose the ones that they plan to observe and likely to miss classes. Based on the days of the week of observances selected, we show them the classes that they are likely to miss as a result. They can then decide whether they plan to miss the classes and if so, an email goes out to the faculty, who can then communicate directly with the student. In addition, students can add any missing days in the calendar (because understandably this is complex and depending on circumstances, the dates in the calendar may be different from the real dates one is used to observing etc), which are then made available to others. Better yet, the faculty can go to the app and look at reports that will give a view into how many possible absences are recorded for a particular class, so he/she can make a decision on whether to reschedule the class. Cool, right?

Well, I am sure that there are apps that can do some of these, but perhaps not in the way it needs to work for us. Also, over a period of time, it is conceivable that someone will build an app that is functionally richer and cheaper. We don’t care about tossing our apps out and adopting them, provided our community will allow us to do it 🙂

OK, need to go and think up the next app to build!!!