E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

In the first quarter of this academic year I was involved with a course on Mobile Service Innovation (SPM9613). The students had to create a mobile service for students. In the last week of the period they had to present it to a jury. The jury consists of a representive of T-mobile, the course manager and me.

Below you can see the different concepts the student groups have presented to us. The winning concept was the group support service

bundle of services to support group work of students and staff at TUDelft:

• Finding a suitable time where all the members can meet and putting this event in their calendars.
• Sending a message to short message to the group
• Quickly checking if there are any recent activities instead of having to log in a desktop computer
• Quickly checking if new documents have been posted. If there is no need to take immediate action there is no need for a user to log in a desktop computer just to see this.

Panza: Book streaming

Nowadays, when students need a book for a course they are following, they have three options: buying the book, borrowing it from a friend or going to the library. Buying a book would cost a lot of money. If they want to borrow it from a friend, he actually has to have it, and if they go to the library, the book might be unavailable.
Recent years have seen the upcoming of the digital book (Kindle, eReader, iBook…). Nevertheless, the prices of the digital books are still relatively expensive. Anyway, Amazon managed to sell this year more digital books than paper books.
We would like to develop a book streaming platform in the university environment to mobile devices (laptops, readers, tablets,…) inspired by music streaming platforms as Spotify, Pandora or GrooveShark. The platform would include study books, lecture notes, slideshows, podcast video and audio. Additionally, it would include library services and would offer 2.0 communication where the teacher will be able to add information.

University position service

In TU Delft, students have to spend some time and energy to find a specific location in an unfamiliar faculty building or even a building itself, especially for new students. Sometimes when we find the destination, we find out that it has been used for other purpose or it is closed at that moment accidentally.
To resolve those problems, it is necessary to develop a mobile service model to provide functions of campus map (including the location of each building, precise map in each building and end-to-end route), real time information of each room in each building. We also want to incorporate timetable which will be linked to campus map function and group video/voice meeting into the model.

Fundle: Lecture feedback service

A mobile application with which you can rate lectures and teachers would be a simple and easy to use way to give feedback on lectures. This will boost the quality of teaching at TU Delft because there will be an incentive for teachers with bad classes or ratings to act on this. This complements the end of course surveys.
This solution is mobile-dependent because of the need to make sure that only student who attended the lecture can rate it, and to make it easy and natural to give feedback.

Interactive lecture service

De service bestaat uit twee delen: een 'lecturer' programma en een 'student' client programma. Het lecturer programma draait op een computer waar de leraar tijdens het college bij kan. Dit programma genereert aan het begin van het college een unieke QR code(2d barcode) voor dat college met daarin wat basis college informatie(naam, vakcode) en het ip adres van de computer waarop het lecturer programma draait. Deze code wordt voor het begin van het college op de beamer weergegeven. Binnenkomende studenten kunnen deze code scannen met de client app op hun telefoon. Deze app maakt vervolgens een verbinding met het lecturer programma. Wat er nu met deze verbinding gedaan wordt bepaald de leraar die bepaalde 'plugins' in of uit kan schakelen via het lecturer programma. Daarnaast zal hij aan de meeste plugins een hoeveelheid content moeten toevoegen. Dit is het idee voor de 'basis service': een realtime verbinding tussen student client app en de lecturer app.
Plugins: Slides; Presentie lijst; Vragen stellen; Oefen opgaven