Mobile Course: Development of a mobile app to access university courses information

Abstract

Nowadays, mobile technologies offer vast possibilities to extend and enrich learning activities. The constant evolution and growing use of these technologies, makes them a powerful instrument to promote a more inclusive education world-wide. Higher Education Institutions must then take advantage of these technologies in order to improve their learning processes. In this context, this paper presents the details of the technical development strategy of a university mobile application (app) called Curso Móvil (Mobile Course, in Spanish), which main objective is to offer students an easy and straightforward access to general information about their courses at the Costa Rica Institute of Technology (TEC). This paper includes a survey of university apps, the main requirements, general architecture design and graphical user interfaces, among other aspects of the app. Curso Móvil was originally developed for Android and its code has already been shared for use by a European university.