On September 29th last year, NOCCCD released the first version (version 1.0) of mobile applications for the two colleges and the School of Continuing Education. These applications were very well received, however, we wanted to improve and continue to build these applications with features that students need. Over the past six months we laid out and executed a plan to add some new features to the first release and on August 8, 2012 our second release of the applications were released (version 1.1). This new release is almost a complete rewrite of the original application and here is what’s new in the 1.1 release:
- Improved User Interface - The new interface allows users to view features in a list view or in an icon view. Transitions from one screen to the next are smoother and cleaner. The application also responds to device orientation changes (Changing the application from portrait to landscape view based on how the device is held).
- Class Schedule - Students have the ability to search for courses and filter courses by campus, term, and type of course (all, hybrid, online, teleweb, or late start). Students can search by instructor, course title, or subject.
- Staff Directory - We added a directory of all campuses and district information with an improved search and display of contact information. You will also find a new tab view to select contact information for any of the campuses or the district.
- Campus Maps - Campus maps now include maps for each NOCCCD institutions with a new tab view to select any of the campus maps.
- Events - The new events feature displays important information by date for a number of events such as the start of registration, end of terms, holidays, and more.
- News - News contains content from the campus newspapers (The Chronicle and The Hornet) in addition to the content provided by each of the campuses. This provides the ability to search content by keywords, date range, and content provider (The Chronicle, The Hornet, Cypress, Fullerton, SCE).
- Financial Aid - This new feature allows students to select financial aid year and view the aid awarded for that year.
- Grades - We have added the ability to view grades by term. Students can select the term by clicking on the current term. Next, a selection of terms will appear. Then click the term to display grades.
- Holds - students can view any registration holds that might stop them from registering for courses. Holds provides a brief explanation for the reason(s) of the registration hold.
- Student’s Schedule - students can view their course schedule by selecting a date. The building and room number have been added to the information displayed by the schedule.
- Transit - The latest version of this feature use the new Google Transit API to provide public transportation, driving, walking, or cycling instructions to the student’s campus.
How are the NOCCCD mobile applications doing? To date we have a total of 12,000 downloads of the applications and 650,000 requests for information from those applications! We’ve contributed the code for the Class Schedule (https://csicode.sungardhe.com/gf/project/classschedule/) and Financial Aid (https://csicode.sungardhe.com/gf/project/finaid/) features back to the open source community so that others may download/update/improve the features that NOCCCD has built.
In addition to the version 1.1 mobile applications, we’ve also added a place to download the latest Android development builds (https://mobile.nocccd.edu) for beta testers or anyone looking to download some of our latest features before they are released in the app stores. We’ve also updated the District’s Mobile site (http://www.nocccd.edu/mobile) to reflect the new 1.1 release.
I’m not sure I’ll bust out that computer with the Pentium processor or if that will even help with how fast my time goes by while I’m at the computer but before my whole day goes by I’d like to say thank you to everyone in the college communities for their input and help with this latest release. I’m sure it won’t be long before we’re planning the next 1.2 release and I’m telling you about all the new things to come in that release. If you have an Apple or Android device you can check out the new applications in the Apple App Store and Google Play.
