The Contra Costa Community College District recently released a new InSite app for mobile phones, available on all app stores along with a companion desktop website available at https://m.4cd.edu/.

The app includes access to Canvas, the Los Medanos College library, daily class cancellation lists, a faculty directory, bus routes to and from campus and more. The InSite app’s user experience is presented through customizable “tiles” that the user can re-arrange at will. The district is optimistic about its potential to help students.

“Students will definitely benefit from using the new app, because our goal was to bring all the various functions that students may need in one place under single login,” District Director of Information and Technology Satish Warrier stated. “The new app features a tile that shows a dashboard into classes that use Canvas from where students can directly access the course…Students will also have the ability to re-arrange and/or hide certain tiles they are not interested in.”

“The motivation was to provide better service to students and employees with a app, which would work consistently across devices and would look very similar no matter what device is used,” Warrier also explained.

“I think the app as a concept will benefit me because it allows me simpler access to my registration and class planning services,” LMC student Arren De Manuel said. “It’s useful that all of the services provided by InSite… are all in one place for students to check out.”

The app and website were created to completely replace the old InSite website as well as the Ellucian GO app. CCCD will run both the new and old InSite suites until July 1, 2018, at which point only the new versions of InSite will be supported. The development team for the app is eager to make changes and updates based on user suggestions before the cutoff date and Warrier concedes that the app, compared to the desktop sites, still has a few ways it could improve.

“The current InSite is meant for desktop computer use,” he explained. “Although students have been using it on mobile devices, it does not work well consistently and it is not mobile friendly. The Ellucian GO app was one step better than current InSite, but still lacked a lot of features the new one provides.”

“We encourage students to provide us feedback thru the app on what they like or dislike,” he stated. “And any feature they would like to see as well.”