SMS at Bath

Following some recent changes to the way that Classroom Technologies are managed by the e-Learning team at the University of Bath, this blog will no longer be updated.  It will however be kept online indefinitely, so links to blog posts will remain active.

With immediate effect, and with the start of the 2010/11 academic year, this blog has been replaced by the new Classroom Technologies blog at: http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/classroomtechnologies/. Please do update your bookmarks and  favourites lists, and RSS feeds.

Please do head along to this new blog to take a look at a range of new resources now available. This includes details on the technology being evaluated as well as related literature and case studies.

As the dust starts to settle, the evaluations are coming in from the Lets talk about Txt:6 event we ran at the University of Bath on the 19th May, with EduTxt (TxtTools).

The slides and recordings are starting to emerge on the events page: http://wiki.bath.ac.uk/display/estaffdev/Let%27s+talk+about+txt+conference

This includes the keynote from Steve Wheeler (Everything you also wanted to know about text but were afraid to ask) and a presentation from Geraldine Jones in the Department of Education at Bath (Extending learning conversations with SMS). There were over 50 attendees (so over subscribed), with a good coverage from both HE and FE.

Overall, the event was a success, when asked

So, a thank you to all those who took part, attended and organised. Until the next one

I’ve written a learning activity (see http://andyramsden.wordpress.com/2010/05/06/sms-learning-activity/)

Part of the process is to get user input on the effectiveness of the activity and how it might be enhanced. The users are staff in the LTEO at the University of Bath. The were asked to complete the activity in pairs and feedback on the following questions.

As you’ll see the learning activity was not perceived as effective, with the feedback suggesting it might not work as a one-off CPD type activity. I’d support this view, I’d suggest this type of activity would work much better in a more traditional learning situation where the outcomes of the decisions can be elaborated on through other learning mediums (face to face, or discussion forums).

There are some really important lessons to learn from the feedback for those designing SMS learning activities. A lot of concern around costs, concerns around I’ve reproduced all the comments and I’ll let you come to your own understanding.

The feedback was as follows;

To what extent do you agree with the following statement? “I was extremely engaged by the SMS text activity?”

• Strongly agree = 0
• Agree = 1
• Neutral = 2
• Disagree = 1
• Strongly disagree = 4

Could you explain your answers to the previous question

• Quick way of getting answers
• Little delay between sending and receiving a reply
• Response were quick
• I found it frustrating – too many steps to go through and at the end would have needed to copy down the url
• Even having identified options the response was to contact e-learning to find out how to use the technology. I would probably just contact e-learning by phone/email/face to face straight away and discuss needs
• Too long winded, esp on a basic phone. How would I transfer all the info in the last instruction – “contact …………….. (long link) from my phone, quickly onto a computer
• I’d rather have a conversation or even an email exchange with an actual person
• I think it is unnecessary to use technology in this way. It doesn’t add anything to the learning experience it is too gimmicky.
• Receiving texts is engaging but it felt a bit like “20 questions” and hard to relate questions in context

Are there barriers to participating in this type of activity?

• Cost – unclear who pays
• Costs – people on PAYG
• Costs of texts
• Need web access on pone to access
• Network availability
• Basic phones
• Frustration factor
• Predictive text
• Small screen
• Assumes people have the technology to engage
• It costs money and you have to have a phone with internet to use links. Also, if you have pay as you go you may not have enough credits
• People will not want to spend money or use free texts taking part in this
• Depends on the phone tariff type? is the phone web enabled? have you got a data tariff? Will people pay to access web links provided?

How could we improve this SMS activity?

• Useful activity but not sure it works well for CPD
• On a webpage not phone
• I wouldn’t use this so unless you could make it a much shorter process. I wouldn’t be interested. There are other, quicker ways
• Keep it shorter and snappier to keep level of engagement up
• Don’t use it

The e-learning Team have joined with TxTtools (the supplier of our SMS service) to organise a 1 day event on the potential use of SMS in teaching, learning and administration.

For more information about this free one day event at the University of Bath (19th May), please see – http://www.bath.ac.uk/learningandteaching/news/?p=210

I was recently invited to present at a ALT-BECTA workshop in Nottingham (). Within the workshop I gathering audience input using SMS. The apporach was to ask a number of questions and present the responses in graphical format. This would be through the export to excel, edit and cut and paste into a word cloud.

Of interest to some will be the use of two objective questions in each text response. For instance, see the image below. This required the audience to only have to send in one text, and reduced my editing / presenting style.

The audience found this straightforward (all resonded) and I found it significantly easier than running two text questions, and overcame the issue of declining number of responses the more questions you ask.

The word cloud illutsrates how the responses looked. This uses wordle.net and I set the diplay setting to horizontal and alphabetical. As you can see, it is very easy to identify the responses by question.

I was interested to read recently about a new tool on Leonard Low’s mobile learning blog. “Votapedia, allows teachers to get instant responses from students in the manner of “audience response systems” – simply using students’ mobile phones to dial a number and hang up. Caller ID means that each student can only vote once… and the results can be instantly aggregated and displayed. Best of all, because the call never connects, the system is free!” I’ll be evaluating Votapedia in the next few weeks and expect to follow-up this post with another detailing the findings.

The following link is to a word document available on the Learning Materials Filestore which is an internal report on the usage of SMS at the University of Bath between 1st September 2008 and 31st January 2009. See http://www.bath.ac.uk/lmf/download/32484

The recommendations are based on the need to continue to support the existing projects, while facilitating the implementation of other pilots. However, this needs to be within a more scaleable and sustainable costing model for Departments and Schools. The recommendations are;

1. Re-allocate the existing (unused) text messages to Departments and Services who are already using the system.
2. Continue to fund the existing incoming numbers for another financial year.
3. Do not purchase any additional bundles of texts, however, create a contingency fund to purchase an additional 2000 texts if required (decision by 28th June, 2009).
4. BUCS starts discussion with existing projects about the proposed local funding model.

The Web Services team at the University of Bath have recently installed the PDA / IPhone plug-in for the word press blogs. This plug-in will enable people to use their mobile devices to read our blogs as it displays the material to suit small screens. This even works on the Nintendo DS using the wireless access and opera mobile browser! It is now much easier for mobile learners to read and comment on our blogs. This facility could be integrated with the Edutxt text messaging service in the following ways:

• Time critical information can be distributed by text messages containing links to blog entries that provide additional information.
• You could use a blog entry to generate a text message which is distributed to a group, thus alerting mobile learners when new information becomes available.
• A blog could be set up to provide regular information bulletins and students could sign up to receive these on their mobile devices

I’m looking forward to using this new facility to develop new ways of using mobile communication to support teaching, learning and research!

The ICM MSc programme by distance learning plan to use the SMS system to provide students with up-to-date information about their module, with the intention of motivating them to log in and engage with the online discussion tasks. If a student is not engaging with the tasks then there will be a follow up with a personal text. It is anticipated that this will be useful in addition to sending an e-mail.

This pilot is due to start immediately and run until the end of May 2009. See the pilots page for more details about this pilot project.

Students registered with learning support services, this month received a text message reminder to make any special arrangements needed for their January exams. Nina Richards, the learning support administrator was surprised at the immediate response the text messages generated. “We text a lot of students with regards to arranging alternative exam arrangements and literally within minutes, we were receiving calls and students were dropping in to sort out their arrangements. It is a really quick and easy method to contact students. However, I feel it is only as good as the records we keep, in that students are forever changing their mobile numbers but do not inform us of the new
number.”

There are plans for the text messages to eventually replace email for this type of communication.

Learning support services have chosen not to personalise their messages to students. Messages begin with text such as “Exam reminder……” or “Appointment reminder…..” and are signed “Learning support services”. I will be interested to see whether an impersonal vs personal approach makes any difference to how the messages are perceived by students as there is literature to suggest that a personal approach can be highly effective.

Challenges:
Failed messages – Problems encountered so far are to do with inaccurate information about mobile phone numbers which led to a large number of messages failing to deliver. Even failed messages incur a charge so it is worthwhile spending time to ensure student data is accurate in this respect, more so if the texting service will eventually replace email.

Next Steps:
1. Although there had been a very positive response to the SMS so far, it was felt that there should be an opt out facility in place. When a student texts back STOP their details should be removed from the SMS database and no more texts sent to them.
2. Next month there are plans to start using SMS to remind students about appointments to meet their advisor. The message scheduling facility should prove a real asset in managing messages to individual students.
3. Next year it will be easier to obtain an up to date database of mobile numbers if students signed up to the service at registration. There are plans to modify the sign up form accordingly.

Evaluation plans:
An interim informal evaluation will be sent out via email to all who have received texts asking about their first reactions to the service.
Students will formerly evaluate the learning support service at the end of the academic year. The evaluation form will be modified to include two questions about the SMS service with respect to the student experience of the support service as a whole.