Towards an implementation of a short messaging system over an e-learning environment

TEC Digital is the e-learning platform used in Tecnológico de Costa Rica (TEC). This learning environment has a notification service via e-mail as main means of communication between teachers and students, but it does not guarantee that students receive and read their email on time. Faced with a need of more flexible communication channels on learning communities, we sought an alternative method to facilitate communications between teachers and students, hence the idea of implementing a SMS´s module (Short Message Service module) due to the prevalence of this technology on students population. This paper focuses on design and preliminary considerations to implement a messaging service according to a virtual communities model. LRN was used as a learning platform for design and implementation tests, and we addressed advantages and disadvantages of using contracted services as opposite to local implementations. In addition, we present some considerations about proprietary hardware and software, data security and some of main problems were encountered during the implementation process. The main advantage of a gateway implementation on personal server is a return on long-term of investment for messages sent and the total control over data transferred. Furthermore, implementation can execute commands on the server from the SMS content received and build an extension to manage message history.