Student Government, in partnership with the computer science department, the Division of Strategic Communications and Modo Labs will launch the new official LSU app on March 30.
The app will be an overhaul of the previous LSU app that includes new features and a new interface.
“We’re essentially in an alpha phase right now, where I have an alpha of it on my phone, and we’ve got two computer science majors at LSU who are helping to design this thing,” SG president Zack Faircloth said. “They’re making positive strides every single day. It’s little tweaks here and there … we’ve got a task force that’s giving feedback where they can.”
On March 17, a pre-release of the app will be available on all app stores, but the official app will be launched on March 30, Faircloth said.
The new app will include features like Moodle integration, an athletics portal, a new student module, an emergency portal linking students to LSUPD or other law enforcement, a news module including University news that will later feature content from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, TransLoc, Tapingo and the Student Health Center prescription refill request.
“Pretty much all of these apps that students have just all over their phone because somebody told them to download it at some point are now centrally located into our app,” Faircloth said.
In addition to the computer sciences department and Division of Strategic Communications, SG has also teamed up with Modo Labs. Texas A&M University and the University of Notre Dame, among other universities, have used Modo Labs to develop apps for their students as well.
Modo Labs’ goal is “to enable college students to easily create compelling, rich mobile websites and native applications using data and content from university back-end systems and other data repositories,” according to their website.
“The beauty of this new system is that really [Strategic Communications] takes the lead on it and then we delegate out to everybody,” Faircloth said. “The other [app] was very siloed off and everybody had to do their own thing.”
While many features will be launched in the initial phase on March 30, there are already plans for additional features to roll out at later times.
One of the future features is a campus map which SG is working to develop with the Parking and Transportation Services office through funding from the Office of Risk Management, Faircloth said.
“It’s going to take a little bit and it’s going to take as much feedback as students are willing to give us to get it right,” Faircloth said. “My goal is to make it really easy to get feedback and that students are quick to say what they would like to see implemented in it because the more students who say what they want, the quicker they’re going to change it.”
