This is a project for the Futures Initiative (FI). During my year as an FI fellow, I plan to build a pilot app for CUNY students. The app would provide students with an mobile events calendar to keep them up-to-date on all CUNY events.
The 24 CUNY colleges offer an incredible array of public programming, but there is currently no easy way to see all events in a single interface. Event announcements are often spread across different university websites or hidden in specific department or research lab web pages. The goal of this project is to create a mobile application (app) for CUNY students. The app will serve as a platform to connect CUNY students via a mobile events calendar. The CUNY Connect calendar app will be an up-to-date source of information about all events across the CUNY network. The major aim of this project is to bridge connections across CUNY, fostering collaboration, innovation, and interdisciplinary work. Connecting CUNY will lead to a stronger system by unifying students, faculty, and administration.
CUNY is a vast interconnected network, highlighted as one of the largest urban public universities in the United States. Events are a key component of the intellectual and cultural offerings that make CUNY valuable not only to students, but to their surrounding communities as well. Making events easier to find raises the profile of the intellectual life of each college, while also making it easier for members of the public to find and attend events on topics that matter to them. At the same time, CUNY is among the nation’s most diverse institutions of higher education. Although located within NYC’s five boroughs, CUNY schools are geographically spread out. This presents the first challenge.
CUNY’s geographic makeup obstructs easy communication between schools. CUNY students are often only immersed within their school of enrollment and are unaware that they are privileged to access the entire span of the CUNY system, including CUNY events. CUNY students need to be informed that they have the right to attend any and all of these events. A large part of informing students lies in an effective online presence. However, successfully traversing CUNY’s online presence to find event information is no easy task. This presents the second challenge. The CUNY homepage (www.cuny.edu) has a scrolling events banner, which links to an events page. Both pages provide comprehensive information with search features that help find events across CUNY. Where students will likely be able to navigate the CUNY site with ease on a browser, it becomes more difficult on a mobile device. The scrolling banner, which is easily navigable in the web browser can now only show one event at a time, forcing students to scroll through event by event.
Similar issues exist on school specific websites. For example, the Graduate Center’s events page has different viewing options (daily, monthly, weekly) as well as preset event type filters. In addition, the main website includes a search feature. However, what is presented on a mobile device is different. On the mobile device, the functionalities of search, filters, and different viewing options do not exist, making it difficult for students to find information.
On average, CUNY students have a commute time of 45–60 minutes each way and typically use public transportation, suggesting that students are often viewing this information on their mobile devices. Research on CUNY students has found that although laptops are designed to be easily transportable, few students regularly bring laptops to campus because of security concerns or because they are just too heavy to carry around. In addition, students have reported the benefits of mobile devices, including being connected to friends, family, college, and their jobs via email, Facebook, and other communication applications on their phones. Some students have even reported doing homework, readings, and even writing papers on their mobile phones.
Another issue, with both platforms, is the need for cellular data or wifi to access the events list. Given the nature of NYC travel, CUNY students often travel via subway, where signals are unavailable. The situation is further complicated by each school’s separate website, which present different layouts, preventing any sort of systematic search across different CUNY sites. Also, where the CUNY events page provides comprehensive information, other web pages, for example the Graduate Center’s site, only provides information about Graduate Center events. Therefore, students who only use their enrollment school’s website will never be exposed to information about other CUNY events. Our proposed mobile app will help address many of these challenges.
The proposed CUNY Connect calendar application will present mobile up-to-date information about all CUNY events. The app will allow offline data access, providing students with events information in any environment. A user friendly interface designed with search, favorites, and push notification functionalities will facilitate access to event information. For any university, events are crucial to the development of research and growth. This app would provide CUNY students with an events calendar that truly reflects the scope and size of the CUNY network, leading to better connections across departments, colleges, and boroughs. This project will include 4 main phases: (1) research, (2) design, (3) development, and (4) deployment. Currently this project is in the research stage.