The now-live mobile website for Penn — m.upenn.edu — is going to be a “mobile ‘portal’ pulling together Penn’s mobile-friendly content and applications,” Vice President for Information Systems and Computing Robin Beck wrote in an e-mail.
The website “is specifically designed to provide a good mobile experience” for those on smartphones, she explained. This means that the layout of the site will be designed with palm-size screens in mind.
Since m.upenn.edu is not application-based, it will be available to “the widest possible community” at Penn, Beck wrote.
It is Beck’s hope that the website will help bring both convenience and connections and will allow information to be easily accessed by students.
According to her, since more than half of college students last year used smartphones, it has become “an expectation that Penn’s systems and web content will be accessible anytime from anywhere.”
“M.upenn is our response to that need,” she added.
College freshman Christina Volcy is ready for Penn’s websites to go mobile because she has already seen one school make the switch to smartphones.
At her high school, she took advantage of the mobile versions of the websites, and she plans to do so with m.upenn.edu in the future.
The website is not designed to translate or replace existing websites. Rather, it’s made to “evolve over time,” explained Beck.
For Volcy, the site could offer something that is “easy to reference” and could answer any questions regarding Penn – instantaneously.
And for those students interested in add/drop-ing in real time, m.upenn will provide a mobile version of Penn InTouch.
