Push Notification Service for Enhancing Relation between Parents and Educational Institutions: A case Study on Egyptian Schools.

Abstract

With the growing interest in utilizing mobile
communications to enhance the interactions between different
partners in educational institutions, particularly in schools.
However, how communicating with parents via applications
while aren't actively running is quite a challenging demand. On
the other hand, the addressed success of the Android supporting
features provided a good candidate to support applications with
real time information. Moreover the Android platforms
supports efficiently customizable notifications, which allow
applications based on Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) to
specify the pushed events. In this paper we demonstrate and
validate the adequacy of mobile services to enhance the
interaction between schools and parents based on efficient use
of push notification service in both real time and critical
information. The paper presents a proposed notification system;
MParent, that actively provide alerts and messaging between
parents and schools. Also, an open approach was used to
determine the reaction of the parents depending on what they
want to be pushed to their phones .The proposed system, the
MParent, was implemented, tested and validated. Evaluation
and questionnaire results have proven how proposed system
satisfy both parties; parents and school administrations.