Yesterday, Christopher Gibbs, a programmer at Abilene Christian University, posted a great follow-up to ACU’s big iPhone announcement on Monday. He asserts that being the first school in the nation to launch a converged mobile educational strategy of this magnitude has obviously put quite a bit of pressure on ACU developers to deliver the applications necessary to maximize the potential of the devices for effective teaching and learning. He goes on to remind us that there are a number of challenges when it comes to creating applications for the iPhone and suggests that the biggest is usability. He writes, “Some people say content is king, well I say usability is king. This is true with any program or website but especially true on the iPhone, where you have a very limited interface.”

Gibbs invites his readers to check out ACU’s concerted development efforts at acu.mobi (best viewed in Safari as it’s designed for the iPhone), but warns that it is still considered a development site and not production ready. There is a protected section (requires and ACU login id) which allows ACU’s developers to display data customized for the user viewing the site and a demo of what you might see if you were logged in.

Gibbs says that a lot of the content on acu.mobi is comprised of links to external apps (like Google Docs, Facebook, etc.) that are customized for the iPhone, but there are also a few that ACU has developed specifically for the university environment. For example, Gibbs has created an application that allows professors to take attendance in class from their iPhone. You can see it in the demo section of acu.mobi under My Classes (professor) -> Roster. It allows the professor to easily select which students are Present, Tardy, Absent, or Excused as well as automatically send an email to those students notifying them of their status.

To see more university-specific applications being developed by ACU for the iPhone and iTouch, be sure to check out acu.mobi.