Editor: Courses should have an app

Editor’s Note: PGM staff members collectively decide on the Staff Ed topic. The staff as a whole provides the opinions and content in this Staff Ed to provide insights and shed light on solutions for events at Pepperdine

You’re out with friends and a classmate texts you—your professor posted your exam grades. You open your phone’s web browser and log into Courses, but it’s hard to navigate. “Courses should have an app,” you tell yourself.

Pepperdine has a mobile app that tracks the bus, displays upcoming events and provides hours of operation for various buildings on campus. However, the app can be buggy and doesn’t always work.

Interestingly, the Pepperdine app lacks the ability to access your class schedule and upcoming assignments.

With the Courses app, students will be able to easily access their assignment calendar and submit assignments in seconds. Students will also be able to receive push notifications directly to their lock screen—notifying them of an upcoming due date or an urgent message from a professor.

Courses already sends emails to students when a professor posts a message on the website or when an assignment is due within 24 hours. The downside to email notifications is that not all students check their emails often, and their inboxes aren’t filled with only necessary academic information. A push notification from the mobile app would grab the student’s attention faster and allow them to take action faster.

Opening courses through a web browser on a mobile device is possible, but it’s not ideal. It’s inefficient and not as easy to navigate, since it’s essentially a series of scaled-down desktop pages. It can be difficult to review assignments or respond to a discussion forum when the site isn’t natively designed for mobile users.

Canvas, a competing web-based learning management software (LMS), has a mobile app for its users. The app has a 4.7 out of 5 star rating on the App Store, indicating very positive reviews.

The app allows students to check upcoming assignments and view their class schedule without having to log in every time. Apple users can even add a widget to their home screen to view their grades. It can be set up to send push notifications for almost anything students want, including, but not limited to, newly posted assignments, grades, and news.

Pepperdine launched a pilot program this semester to test Canvas, which will run throughout the 2024-2025 academic year in select courses. Participating professors and students will voluntarily provide feedback on their use of Canvas in their classes, which the Technology and Learning team will present to university stakeholders this spring. Pepperdine will then decide whether to transition from Courses to Canvas, meaning students could access the university’s LMS through the app in the near future.

But even if Pepperdine decides to continue using Courses, which is powered by Sakai LMS, a better mobile solution has proven possible. Loyola University Chicago, for example, integrates Sakai into its institution’s comprehensive mobile app. Sakai apps for Rutgers University and Duke University students also previously existed, although both universities switched to Canvas in recent years.

If we have an app that lets us track where the next bus is, why don’t we have one that lets us check our latest exam grade or reassures us when a deadline is approaching? It sounds obvious, and yet Pepperdine still doesn’t have a mobile app with basic academic information.

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