Unified and Personalized Messaging to Support E-Learning

The University of Lancaster is a campus based educational institution with over 10,000 members of staff and students on campus during a typical day. The University is currently investigating the use of mobile and smart devices as a platform for delivering mobile learning services and administrative information on a personalized basis. This paper describes two current active areas of development. First, we present an SMS text messaging extension to our Virtual Learning environment (VLE) and describe how this is used to provide personalized messaging. Second, we present our work on a Bluetooth based communications service, named BlueZone, which we use to complement SMS text messaging to offer an alternative communications platform to students. The combination of these technologies provides a unified and cost effective delivery mechanism for communicating with University undergraduates on a large scale.