Evolving the Design of a Mobile Application to Support Transition to Tertiary Education

Abstract

Students' transition to tertiary education plays a critical role in their overall postsecondary experience. Even though educational institutions have designed and implemented various transition support programs, most of them still struggle to collect detailed information and provide tailored and timely support to students. With the high adoption rate of smart phones among university students, mobile applications can be used as a platform to provide personalized support throughout the transition, which has the potential to address the shortcomings of existing programs. Moreover, the use of mobile applications to support the transition to tertiary education can benefit from emerging techniques to design applications to support individuals through transition processes. In this paper, we present the design and development process of myUniMate, a mobile application that allows students to track and reflect on information from multiple aspects of their university lives. The paper describes the user-centered design approach used in the design, the implementation process, and how the initial version evolved based on our previous study. We conducted a 4-week field trial with first year university students to validate our design.Keywords: transition, mobile, tertiary education, user-centered design, transition to higher education inTrODUcTiOn For a significant percentage of the young population, being admitted into universities is one of the many milestones in their lives (Krause et al., 2005). However, this achievement comes with challenges, as starting tertiary education requires students to conduct considerable adjustments in many aspects of their lives. It is for this reason that the first year experience is considered of critical significance to students (McInnis et al., 1995(McInnis et al., , 2000. In Australia, over one quarter of students in higher education are considering deferring study or discontinuing (Krause et al., 2005), and approximately half of the students who failed to graduate from university withdraw in their first year (Australia Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs, 2000). During the first semester, withdrawing from university is considered by one-third of first year students (McInnis et al., 1995(McInnis et al., , 2000, and events that occur in the first year also lead to withdrawals at second and third years (Tinto, 1995). The reason for withdrawal from university are diverse, however, there is a general agreement in the literature that it is the failure of adjustment to the university lifestyle or environmental factors that lead to the majority of withdrawals (Williams and Pepe, 1982;Tinto, 1995). The factors of first year students' withdrawal from university are summarized as (Tinto, 1995): -a lack of clearly defined goals on the part of the student, -a mismatch between the student and the course or university culture, and -a feeling of isolation. These results suggest that a successful integration of first year students should occur in both academic and social domains, as both a...