I had a brief conversation with Pablo and Alma last week and it got me thinking about how we could prototype a method of pushing information via SMS to students. If I understand the use case, we're talking about a small population that primarily relies upon their phone for communication and is missing important campus communications sent via email, flyer, portal or US Mail. Our objective would be to push information using SMS as a supplementary protocol.
I did some research on what tools are available in Drupal that might assist us with a prototype. Using the SMS Framework, we would be able to configure a local site to push SMS through a gateway and out to the individual phones. Clickatell is a service provider that acts a gateway. Clickatell has a cost structure that would need to further investigated. They have some calculators that can help us estimate what the campus cost would be per message. Students who would be receiving messages may also have a cost per SMS message received.
Here's how this might work. Students would need to provide a baseline of information so we can reach them (First, Last, Phone, Email). Within the Drupal site, a piece of content would be created; call it a deadline notice. The deadline notice is about 140 characters in length. When the deadline notice is saved, data is pushed to the SMS gateway. The students who have been subscribed to deadline notices would start receiving messages.
Workload and automation for this type of prototype still need to considered. Because we'd want to secure the site from abuse, we need to consider the type of data we'd be using (the personal student data), how we'd work with that feed (does it come from AIS, or is this outside of AIS) and the nature of the messages we want to send (non-confidential, group based deadline information). Assuming that we'd prototype this with some student or staff volunteer records, we could test a potential solution to get an estimate on the workload involved in all aspects of the system from administration through data entry with a minimal investment; low hundreds of dollars for the Clickatell gateway usage.
A similar use case has been identified by TAPS for van pool and shuttle bus drivers who may need to receive SMS messages for real time updates on traffic situations. This has been tested successfully using a commercial service. I'll get the details on that and see if we have more options to research.
1/20/2011 - Met with Pablo, Terri and Stephen to review the problem definition. Here's the next several items to figure out:
- Need to determine how a student would opt-out of this application
- Need to understand student data security since this would be a pull from AIS
- Need to finish configuring and testing with some volunteers
- Need to buy a block of SMS credits so we can run the test and fully evaluate its effectiveness
- Need to understand the lifecycle of student data. Do we delete each quarter and begin again?
- Peter to create accounts for Terri, Stephen and Pablo
- Peter to write up some basic instructions with screen shots on how to create content, subscribe students to the content and manage the content over time.