AWS Public Sector Blog
How Penn State built an all-in-one campus resource app on Modo Labs’ development platform using AWS
In 2019, Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) began looking for a better way to meet the needs of its digital-native student population—specifically, a seamless way to connect students with on-campus resources. Seeking to create a personalized mobile app experience, Penn State partnered with Modo Labs, an educational technology company (EdTech) offering a no-code app-building platform powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). The result of this collaboration was Penn State Go, an all-in-one platform that quickly connects students to vital resources and services.
The right platform for efficient app development
“We chose Modo Labs because it offered easy tools for creating a mobile experience that would help us consolidate all the resources that we had,” says Ryan Seilhamer, product owner of Penn State Go. “They offered good mobile features, such as quick content creation, being able to embed SDKs, and being able to expand throughout the device. Creating our own custom integrations was something that we didn’t see on other platforms.”
Penn State used several different AWS tools in its app development, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), AWS Lambda, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL, and Amazon Route 53 for domain name system (DNS) servers.
“Penn State also uses XModule,” shares Andrew Yu, founder and president of Modo Labs. “That’s low-code development technology that Modo invented that uses AWS Lambda to provide out-of-the-box capabilities. It gives our customers the ability to build their own integrations and widgets.”
The development of the app moved quickly, with Penn State leveraging the Modo Labs software as a service (SaaS) platform to create the basic app in about two months. Seilhamer’s team was ready for beta testing in Fall 2019—they needed 1,000 students and received 5,000 requests to participate. Student interest was high and Penn State captured detailed feedback from student testers who used the app every day.
Modifying app resources to meet the COVID-19 challenge
“Our biggest challenge out of the gate, pulling all of these diverse systems and data sources together, was that the app needed to cater to a wide range of users,” says Seilhamer. “Balancing out what they want and need, versus what we could deliver, took a lot of planning and work.”
Penn State Go officially launched in January 2020 and COVID-19-related shutdowns began a few months later. Fortunately, Penn State seamlessly pivoted this new student resource to send COVID-19 safety communications to students. The ability of the Modo Labs platform to quickly create customized features greatly helped the university meet this challenge.
“We were able to collaborate with Penn State and share many of the platform’s best practices,” says Yu. “They were able to quickly modify the app to help during COVID, and also post-COVID when students returned to campus.”
Penn State Go finds success and continues to grow
Today, the Penn State Go app serves 90,000 undergraduate and graduate students and faculty across 23 Penn State campuses. Since 2020, the app has had 332,000 downloads and has logged around 119 million lifetime user interactions, with 85 percent of students using the app at least one time a week. Students use the app to access a wide range of resources, including registering for classes through LionPATH, viewing email, accessing maps, viewing campus event calendars, looking up live shuttle transportation information, and ordering food through Penn State Eats.
“A lot of students these days, especially the post-COVID population, are really thirsty for campus interactions, making friends, and so on,” says Yu. “Penn State Go, helps deliver that experience digitally.”
Over time, Penn State has continued to solicit student feedback and update the app. Most recently, the focus has been on more personalized content and integrated services. Whereas the original rollout was focused on giving students access to all resources, now Penn State is working to make resources discoverable so that students can more easily find the right resources for them.
“We have been building a more personalized student experience,” explains Seilhamer. “Today, when the student logs in, they get a personalized message. They are able to customize their resources, organize them, and can get quick access to apps like Canvas and Starfish for advising.”
Seilhamer’s team is also working with different academic colleges and campus organizations, including housing, to deliver personalized content to these unique populations. In addition, university organizations can use the app for campus events support.
“We host something like 14 events inside the app every year now, and it keeps growing,” says Seilhamer. “We build an event and we’re able to reuse the content every year, with little modification. For recurring events, we can literally stand them up in about 30 minutes.”
Modo Labs delivers scale and seamless access to tools through AWS
The Penn State Go app has been a huge success with students and the widening groups of users that now access it—including alumni and families, who were extended access to the app in 2021.
“In the five years the app has been active, I’ve seen tremendous, continual improvement,” says Seilhamer. “Building out these personalized experiences, being able to connect students with the different resources, connecting them with these different data sets—it’s a game changer for us to be able to do all of this.”
“Our customers leverage our platform to deliver additional capabilities and value to their end users and the traffic keeps growing,” says Yu. “With more and more resources being used, having AWS as our platform gives us the flexibility and the performance that we need to support them.”
In addition to meeting the scale of demand needed by customers like Penn State, the use of straightforward AWS development tools, allows non-technical staff to work on their projects within the app.
“The other side of the investment that we’ve made, again leveraging AWS infrastructure, is to make it easier for non-technical staff to come in and create their own event agendas and all the features that they want to include,” says Yu. “This allows our customers to work cheaper and faster.”
Meeting the evolving needs of students
Modo Labs continues to improve its platform to better meet the changing needs of its customers and their stakeholders, especially students. The company recently released Modo Connect, a tool that lets users to communicate with each other using the app. It relies on Amazon Rekognition to help with image recognition and filtering out inappropriate content. A generative artificial intelligence (AI) -powered chatbot is also in the works, using Amazon Bedrock with the large language model, Claude 3 Haiku, to help improve the overall accuracy and timeliness of the user experience in an app.
These new and upcoming features highlight Modo Labs’ focus on the evolving needs of its users—students.
“Penn State realized the need to talk to students to really understand what they’re looking for,” explains Yu. “The COVID generation is different from the prior generation, and the class of 2030 will be even more different than what we have today. For this digital experience to work, it has to help students find the right type of resources at the right time—and that need is always changing.”