Reaching beyond the Classroom through the Use of Push Notifications

Abstract

New technologies enable educators to modify their \ teaching methods and extend their reach beyond the \ classroom. One of these methods that can be applied to \ communicate with students is through the use of push \ notifications on smartphones. Instead of relying on \ students to use a spaced learning approach, which is \ proven to be more efficient than trying to study \ something in a short period of time, it is now possible \ to remind them to learn and stick to a learning \ schedule from day one. For this research we \ implemented a mobile application that enables \ students to subscribe to a course and get push \ notifications on their smartphone if new questions are \ being made available by the teacher. The experiment \ we conducted shows that students who use push \ notifications are returning more often to the \ application and better stick to a given learning \ schedule than students who don’t have push enabled.