Goal-oriented through your studies - with the help of a study app

With seed funding from the SMWK, our eleven-member team has spent the last six months laying the groundwork for the development of a smartphone app, which is designed, on the one hand, to help students adjust to everyday college life and, on the other hand, to support them in the long term with time and goal management throughout their academic careers.

To tailor the Studier app as effectively as possible to our future users, we conducted interviews with academic advisors and held discussion groups with high school students, college students, and college dropouts to explore what factors contribute to successfully completing a degree. For our interviewees, one skill was central to a successful academic journey: goal orientation. When students have a clear goal in mind, they are good at motivating themselves to study and sticking to the timeline of their academic plan, thereby increasing their chances of successfully completing their degree. University students from various disciplines cited the following as important, motivating goals: acquiring knowledge, personal development, social connections, and career preparation; the goal of “being good at their studies”; and securing a spot in a master’s program.

In the future, the study app is intended to support students in achieving these academic goals. To this end, the app offers, on the one hand, a timeline structured according to the respective course catalog of the major for the concrete implementation of these goals and, on the other hand, a variety of features that make managing the day-to-day demands of college life easier. To this end, an initial prototype of the app will be developed by the end of the year as part of the ongoing project, and a software concept for the app’s full implementation will be created. This implementation and the evaluation of the Studier-App through user testing are scheduled to take place in a second project phase, the funding for which is unfortunately still unclear. Nevertheless, we remain committed to our goal of supporting students in achieving their academic goals.