CALL FOR EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST
Dear IFITT members,
We would like to invite you to participate to the project RAPORT – Rapid App Prototyping and Open Innovation Resource Toolkit, the project that has won IFITT Innovation Fund 2016. It is a pilot project aimed at supporting IFITT members who wish to use mobile apps within their research or for IFITT educators to provide ‘innovation workshops’ around app development.
RAPORT is intended to benefit the IFITT community; since there are only 20 licenses available in this project to develop Mobile apps, we invite interested IFITT members to submit an expression of interest.
Expression of interest should be a one-page document, explaining how the interested IFITT member would like to use RAPORT for their research and/or teaching, and including 10 lines profile of the applicant. They have to be sent via email to [email protected] ([email protected] in CC) by May 22.
Available licences will be awarded to projects based on:
- Integration within courses/curricula or current research lines
- Relevance with the research/teaching curriculum of the applicants
- The time they have been submitted
All applicants will be notified by June 1st, 2016.
Next Monday, May 9 at 5 PM CEST, a Hangout on Air will take place with John Bustard, who will support those participating in the project.
You can get further information at www.ifittraport.org or read the following project outline:
RAPORT – the ‘Rapid App Prototyping and Open Innovation Resource Toolkit’ is a pilot project aimed at supporting IFITT members who wish to use mobile apps within their research or for IFITT educators to provide ‘innovation workshops’ around app development. This platform will allow for multiple use cases for IFITT members and is hoped to encourage innovative research to take place within the community and around mobile applications as tourism mediating tools. The project provides further potential to create new research opportunities through collaboration with industry stakeholders and partners.
Example research use: The applicant aims to use the platform to provide an app to support a Tourism event. The app will be used to involve users in co-creating a better event experience, focusing on collaboration through push notifications to users before, during and after the event. Through netnography, data will be gathered and analyzed to assess its validity in collaboratively improving the event experience. In the process it will be possible to test user acceptance of proactive (push) information in varying contexts, with differing demographics, geographical areas in relation to better understanding user needs.
Example Teaching use: In using the platform as a teaching aid, a pilot has been carried out with a cohort of 14 groups within an e-Tourism module. This provided deeper learning and a means of experiencing and exploring ‘mobile strategies’ (initially tested with undergraduates at Ulster University, November 2016 by the project coordinator).
Therefore, this project aims to provide significant benefit and access to an innovative platform which has been used by the promoter to deliver tourism and event apps (see appendix 1) and thus offers stability and validity in assuring the following project outcomes:
(1) Rapid Prototyping of mobile applications – to provide a toolset to develop and deliver both preview and published apps (preview apps remain unpublished through the appstore but still possess all the app functionality in a preview mode).
(2) A toolkit to explore app prototyping for deeper pedagogy, understanding and insights (further detail on both activities in the Objectives and main innovations section below).
Best regards,
Oriol Miralbell
IFITT Board member, Director of IFITT Innovation Fund