SMS for Long Student Messages

Greetings from the 8th International Conference on Computer Science and Education (ICCSE 2013) in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where H.K.S. Premadasa is speaking on "Implementation of Concatenated Short Messaging Service in a Campus Environment". The idea is to send a long teXt messages to students where the messages is broken up into a series of short SMS text messages which are automatically reassembled for display on the student's device. This could work well with my proposal for synchronized asynchronous e-learning, to be discussed at the conference tomorrow. Where bandwidth is at a premium, the relatively slow SMS system could be used to send small amounts of information to keep students on track with their learning. This could then key students to refer to locally stored materials such as videos and e-books. It would be interesting to see how hard it would be to interface a Learning Management System (LMS) such as Moodle, to send messages via SMS as an alternative to email.

Integrating a secure short messaging system with message concatenation into a learning management system (LMS), provides a facility for teachers to communicate with students effectively. In this paper, we propose an open-source mobile-based short messaging system with message concatenation that can be easily integrated into the Moodle LMS. Initially, a database is integrated into the LMS that holds message information such as recipient’s phone number, message body, user data header (UDH), etc. The UDH associated message concatenation with short messaging service is used to transmit data in the SMS for the students. Authenticated users can create extensive text messages using a mobile device connected to the Internet. Statistical analysis of results during a campus-wide implementation of the system reveals positive feedback of students in using SMS for academic activities.

From: "Implementation of Concatenated Short Messaging Service in a Campus Environment, H.K.S. Premadasa,  Sabaragamuwa Univ. of Sri Lanka, R.G.N. Meegama, Univ. of Sri Jayewardenepura, ICCSE 2013, pp. 207-212.