Broadly the findings fall into four major categories that are discussed in turn below. These relate to how the university communicates with students
electronically, how value is demonstrated in the new services, what the levels of staff and student engagement are with the concept of text messaging and lastly how does the structure and strategy of IT provision impact on the service.
Communication. This looks at when it is appropriate to use text messaging as a form of communication but also interestingly who controls that communication and whether there are ethical implications about its use. The university has traditionally communicated with students electronically through the student email system but this has become increasingly unreliable initially through students preferring to use their private email addresses for any email interaction and more recently through a trend for students to use social networking tools such as Facebook for their person-to-person communication. As one tutor summed up:
“ We don’t rely on email because we are aware a lot of students don’t look at the student email account” Tutor.
There was notable concern amongst tutors about how students found out about certain events and the tutors’ awareness of this. Several examples were given where students would ask tutors whether they were aware of a particular announcement and the tutors would have difficulty in tracking down who had originated the message. In short, they wanted to be well prepared for questions from students about change to particular events/ schedules and didn’t want to spend time digging around to find the originator of the message. Text messaging just added to that concern –
“I think part of the problem these days there’s just so much information” Tutor.
It was felt that if there was one place where messages could be displayed and delivered from then that would ease the communication problems. Often faculty offices may send text to students but tutors would have no reference to these messages:
“Because there was this possible conflict in messages going out from faculty and messages going out from the VLE and nobody knowing who was responsible for what“ Tutor.
This can leave tutors in a difficult position –
“what tends to happen is that a student will say to you I’ve had a text about so and so and you have to say well I’m sorry I’ve got no idea who would have sent you that text or what it means or why they’re saying that” Tutor.
One could assume that tutors are looking to control communication with students but they deny this, they just want to be able to see all the communication via a central point, the VLE being the obvious candidate to manage this –
“not that we’d want control but it would be nice to know what they were saying but we don’t tend to get told other than when our office manager
manages to find something out and then she passes it on to us” Subject Lead Tutor.
Tutors are looking to see a policy or strategy so consistent communication is achieved to all students and they can always be informed and also know how and when to use particular communication methods –
“a clear communication policy about what sort of messages for what particular type of communication” Subject Lead Tutor.
Getting communicating right was a priority for the university and was a source of negative feedback in national student surveys. Text messaging could just
exacerbate the problem as it presented another opportunity for inconsistency illustrated by this comment –
“I was extremely disappointed as I received no text messages despite several tutorials being cancelled or room changes. The only text I did get from Uni was about paying fees. This showed that the Uni was more interested in making money rather than providing a genuine service” Student.
There was widespread agreement amongst tutors, managers and IT service representatives that text was not the panacea to all communication problems. All parties agree that there has to be an alternative for those who choose not to use text or who do not have access to a mobile phone –
“can be a bit messy because you can have somebody posting an urgent message and there’d be no text back up and somebody posting an urgent message and there would be a text and then you’ve got the possibility of students then saying, well I just rely on text for urgent messages and I wasn’t texted” Tutor.
Also tutors and service providers acknowledge that they cannot assume all students have access to a mobile phone as it’s not mandated by the university and they must also recognize that student may lose their mobile phones at times –
“there will be people who have no phone that day or just had their phone nicked the night before…. there are all kinds of reasons why someone might miss something and therefore it can’t be the only method” Tutor. There was also widespread concern over the ethical context of using a student’s mobile phone for communication. Should the university assume this is
acceptable or should they have an explicit opt-in or opt-out mechanism? Some students appear not to be too concerned by this, whereas others are very specific about their phone being a personal space –
“I hate being texted by unknown things and bothering me, I like my phone to be used for the purposes that I have agreed it should be used for” Student.
There are two approaches to handling this within the university’s set of text messaging uses. In one system, the mobile phone number is taken from student enrolment forms whereas in the other systems student have to opt-in by
registering their mobile phone number on a website. The advantages of the first approach appear to be that it would reach more students by default whereas the second approach requires students to be pro-active in their registration.
The university has considered the privacy issue and with the initial “MCAT” system had asked the legal department review the situation and -
“had it written into the student registration forms that they could be contacted by text” Telephony Manager.
The university is not that explicit about this during the registration process the view being
“if they read the registration forms correctly there is a clause in there” Telephony Manager
and
“they’re accepting the fact that we can contact them by text and to opt out they have to tell their departmental offices” Telephony Manager.
Data from a student survey would suggest that students don’t really pay attention to this during the registration process so their “consent” is often a default rather than an informed choice. Still evidence is scant that many students have a
problem with this and there is evidence that an opt-in service doesn’t get the take up –
“they’ll see the benefit once they start receiving messages but to actively go somewhere and sign up for it, although it might only take, a minute it’s just they see it as “I’ve got another little annoying thing to do that somebody needs needs something out of me why can’t they get it already I’ve put it in my registration data” Telephony Manager.
Other tutors felt that although there may be a very small number of students who would be concerned about the privacy aspects of this for the majority –
”I don’t think it’s a principled decision to not opt in” Tutor. One further aspect of communication is that of students changing phone numbers. The university executive had reservations about the use of text messaging as they had a perception that students would frequently change their phone numbers as
“we perceived that students often changed phones to keep up with the latest technology” Deputy VC.
In a survey of 128 students, 85% expected to keep the same phone number after one year so the executives’ perception was inaccurate. However that still
indicates a problem in that over the average three-year course there was the potential for a third of students to change their numbers. IT services admit that
“enrolment data gets out of date, so you are going to be missing some students” IT Services
and that
“this was something they looked at initially” IT Services
but had yet to come up with a satisfactory solution. It was widely accepted by tutors, administrators and IT providers that students may not be pro-active in updating their registration information. This was one rationale that some tutors were keen to see text messages delivered through the VLE as at least then they could point to a single place where all relevant messages could be found, even if the student chose not to receive any of these by text –
“I like the idea of all messages to students going on the VL even if some of these get delivered by text as well, that seems a more cohesive system to me” Tutor.
Tutors were wary of the MCAT system for fear that important messages might not reach the students as they too had the perception of a constant churn in mobile phone numbers,
“I mean how many of them will change their number during the year, loads of them” Tutor.
Demonstrating Value. Having discussed the issues surrounding coordinated communication, are there actually strong requirements to text message students? In trying to find out how the projects had been initiated it appears that the requirements originated from the perception that students would respond and engage with text. According to IT services the requirements came about through numerous ad-hoc requests of the form:
“people were asking, can we text, can we text from email etc.…” IT officer.
There was also some input from students:
“we’ve got a very limited bit of feedback and I can’t think where it came, where it was from some part time students who were really enthusiastic about this” Centre for Learning and Teaching.
And another tutor recalling discussions in lectures:
“we have had discussions about this they’re all sort of keen on the idea” Tutor.
Some tutors also considered the cost benefit analysis in trading off the cost of sending out messages versus the potential disruption and cost of informing students about changes in other ways:
“Compared to the disruption that it causes even if it was still 10p a message sending it out to forty students would be £4 and it’s much more than £4 worth of effort of somebody’s time to go out and tell people about changes, or to stop the complaints coming about you never told us” Tutor.
It is more difficult to assess the value of the service. All of the feedback is anecdotal although there are many examples where it has been effective. IT services admit that there is no official survey on use of text messaging and they haven’t attempted formal evaluation:
“So we have never done any feedback forms or surveys with our text messaging system” Telephony Manager.
However, anecdotal evidence from different groups of users suggests it has been effective. For example, the art and design faculty used the system so that students return equipment such as cameras which they loan from the university for project work –
“the admin people are saying that they’re finding more response back; they are finding more response back to them than they did with a letter or email” Telephony Manager.
Use of the service appears to be sporadic with some faculties making significant use whereas others are not using the service at all. IT Services felt that there has been some perception that costs would be too high from some faculties but it also seems that some tutors and administrators were pro-active in seeking out this type of service:
“I think it’s been a bit historic I think initially it was the cost, but once people use it this is less of an issue” Telephony Manager.
More recently the university executive had supported the use of the service based on trying to combat issues of student frustration with university communication arising from the National Student Survey and other internal surveys of student satisfaction:
“I think once the deputy VC pushed out his email to say that we’ve got this facility, and this is the way students want to be communicated from a student survey, then I think more people have come back and said well you know we’ll put one or two people on it we’ll try it out” Telephony Manager
However despite encouragement, the system remained sporadically used and usage is still light, taking the university as a whole:
“we don’t actually track usage other than to apportion cost ... ... I can tell you how many we’ve sent all told and it’s not vastly used, put it that way”. Telephony Manager
One issue with usage is for students to see value in the service and it seems they don’t see that unless an event occurs for which the text message saves them from a problem, such as travelling to a cancelled lecture. One tutor even remarked that the university should test out the service deliberately to engage the students:
“it’s almost worthwhile changing venue for the third lecture or something and sending a text about it” Tutor.
It is perhaps significant that staff still view text messaging as a pilot service as IT services readily acknowledge:
“Well it still is a pilot service as it were because we didn’t know how it would be used, how it would be accepted” Telephony Manager.
This reflects the fact that it seems to be embedded in some areas particularly for administrative tasks such as recalling equipment on loan or reminding students of fee payment deadlines, but is unused in many subjects.
In assessing the value of the text messages services, cost has been a dominant factor with many interviews relating that cost of sending messages was a concern of faculty or department heads. Some managers seem to recognize that the cost of sending messages is exceeded by the savings in staff time in sorting out students’ problems and complaints. But other managers view the cost as an additional charge as staff time is already a sunk cost in their budgets. Billing seems to have been a major driver behind product choice, much more so than technical requirements. IT Services had chosen the MCAT solution because it offered the ability to pay after usage and allocate changes to individual
departments, a key driver being to ensure costs were not placed on central IT budgets:
“The other vendor was a pre-paid web based product and MCAT was a post paid product so that met our needs” Telephony Manager.
But the MCAT service couldn’t be used from within the VL as it didn’t have a programmable interface but this wasn’t a factor in the original procurement:
“but that’s not the way really we wanted to work, we wanted to allocate certain amounts to certain departments” Telephony Manager.
The differing requirements of cost model and technology capability have driven different parts of the university to adopt different solutions with no evidence of a common strategy, which can unite all the requirements through a single solution. This presents a significant barrier to embedding text messaging as a service and tempts different groups into the formation of separate local networks which might otherwise be a single network which translates irreversibly into a common global solution (Callon, 1991).
Engagement. In the initial field study (Chapter 4) consisting of 10 universities, there was anecdotal evidence of staff resistance to the use of mobile
technologies. The research into text messaging looked for evidence of this and also tried to gauge the level of student engagement. Generally staff seemed to like the idea of text messaging students about certain events but there was no agreement on whose responsibility this should be with some looking to administrators to handle this role:
“It’s not our job to do this, it’s not the job of an academic if we are sick and we are at home there is no way we should be expected to log into a computer on our sick bed and send a message to students saying that a class is cancelled” Tutor.
This is contrasted to the idea of VLE announcements appearing by text. Staff normally retain responsibility for putting announcements on the VL and don’t expect or necessarily want administrators to do this. There is a strong link back here to the discussions on communication strategy and solving the problem of having one place where students receive messages.
As for students, they seem positive about using text and are genuinely pleased when it saves them effort or unnecessary travel. –
“When I’ve used it for my announcement I got really positive feedback and girls stopped me in the class and I wasn’t expecting it, actually she said ‘I just want you to know I really appreciate the fact that you texted us’” Tutor.
Where the service was opt-in through the VLE, only around 15% of students registered their phone numbers even though over 80% of students surveyed claimed they would like this service. This goes back to the debate on whether all students get texted or whether it’s optional.
Links to IT Strategy and structure of IT provision. The final area of discussion that emerges from the interview data is that of how IT services is structured and how text messaging links back into a whole IT and communication strategy. There is a separation of those who look after the IT infrastructure, those who look after telephony and those who look after learning technologies such as the VLE. Although eventually there is common senior management, this separation of functions appears to be an issue when dealing with something like text messaging which may rely on the support of all three areas. There was already some evidence of disjointed thinking in IT provision in HE from some earlier research undertaken in preparation for this thesis at a different institution, which had looked at podcasting support (Bird and Stubbs, 2008). Initially IT services had not managed the introduction of podcasting seeing it as not “core business”. As podcasting spread from tutor to tutor, many downloaded podcasting software from the internet and gradually the university servers filled up with draft
space. This highlighted both the lack of mobile technology strategy and that the structure of IT service provision may also be a barrier to its introduction. Thus this research into text messaging was informed by this prior research.
At the time of this research, there was re-structuring in place in the university IT