Reaching beyond the Classroom through the Use of Push Notifications

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.