UNMC’s ITS department is working with the Student Senate on a new mobile app for students, which will debut when the fall semester starts, said Yvette Holly, assistant vice chancellor for ITS.
Holly said the app will be designed to enhance the students’ UNMC experience.
“It will improve communication and provide convenience to the students.”
The creation of a mobile application for UNMC was one of the priorities of the 2014 Student Senate and is becoming a reality with support from UNMC Chancellor Jeffrey P. Gold, M.D. The Student Senate Issues Committee, led by Vice President Alicia Schiller, has provided valuable input for the design and functions of the application. The Student Senate will be involved with beta testing the app this summer.
“When students brought this request to our attention and we did some research on it, we quickly realized there were a few schools that had developed such mobile applications and the students there found them very advantageous for their use,” said Dele Davies, M.D., vice chancellor for academic affairs. “It also was helpful that Chancellor Gold was heavily involved in the successful implementation of such an app at the University of Toledo.”
A complete list of features is still being developed, but the app will provide access to campus maps, online directories, schedules and other useful information, Holly said.
Krupa Savalia, Student Senate president, said one purpose of the app is to improve communication across all the colleges on the UNMC campuses.
“Nowadays, people are incredibly reliant on their phones and the Internet to obtain useful information on the go. We thought this would be a great project for our campus at this time,” she said.
The student leaders were pleased at how quickly the app project was approved, and Savalia said collaboration with ITS on the development of the app has been a positive experience with tremendous productivity over a relatively short amount of time.
“The ITS team has thoughtfully considered our topics of student interest and they have prioritized making those suggestions high priority content on the application,” she said.
Schiller is excited about the fall launch.
“We’d like to kick it off with the beginning of the semester with new students coming to campus,” she said. “I’m sure we’ll add to it as time goes, but we want the app to be functioning when students return in August.”