The University of San Diego is going mobile to connect with its growing student body and said other schools need to embrace the platform.

Among several new mobile initiatives is an iPhone application, mobile landing site and application for BlackBerry smartphones. The application and other mobile deployments that were created by Terriblyclever Design were paid for by the school?s IT budget.

?Our students are extremely mobile,? said Chris Wessells, vice provost and chief information officer at the University of San Diego. ?We just want apps that are practical and in demand for the students.?

University of San Diego is a Catholic university in California chartered in 1949. The school enrolls approximately 7,800 undergraduate and graduate students.

USD?s applications and mobile sites allow students to perform a variety of functions while on the go.

Students can register for classes, access a faculty and staff director, find their classes on a GPS map, get directions, find out who preffessors are, browse courses and search library catalogs.

Eventually, USD said it would like to make tuition and other payments available via mobile devices.

With that addition to the mobile platforms, USD will also open up other commerce opportunities to places like the school bookstore.

?Students are much more mobile than they used to be in the past,? Mr. Wessells said. ?They want info in their hands, we have a pervasive wireless network on campus and a student is not going to flip open a laptop to see when the next tram is coming.

?We believe students want info in the palm of their hand,? he said.

USD updates its applications and mobile sites with campus news and events, athletic news and scores in real time, a course catalog to enable users to browse and make decisions on enrollment and official university streaming media.

Additionally, wallpaper and photos are available for download.

Mobile application development for higher education facilities is nothing new.

Last year, AT&T Inc. announced the winners of its first Big Mobile On Campus Challenge, a national higher education contest for mobile application development.

Prizes were awarded at a reception during the AT&T Higher Education CIO Forum at The Ritz-Carlton Orlando, Grande Lakes in Orlando, FL. The grand-prize winner was a team of full-time students from Stanford University (see story).

Mr. Wessells said USD?s mobile applications were designed to make the school more accessible to students and to make things more effective and practical because of the prevalence of mobile devices amongst college students.

Within the first four hours of the application launches there were more than 500 downloads.

?I think universities and colleges that don?t invest in mobile apps will find themselves in a predicament,? Mr. Wessells said. ?We happen to be among the leading universities in the country to do this.?