CHAPTER ONE

1.0   INTRODUCTION

Computers with the power of the internet have thrived in aiding communication among people. The telephone system, which is the main communication system that was invented several years ago, had undergone a great improvement, so much that today we have fixed wireless phones, mobile phones and the likes. With the rapid development of mobile phones come several services like the Short Messaging Service (SMS), Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), Email Service and others, which are readily available and add to the usefulness of mobile phones.

SMS and Email in particular is widely used in communication, and more recently has been leveraged to provide several services like airline ticketing, banking services, commercial services like share and sell (an added service provided by MTN Nigeria), where subscribers can easily share and/or sell airtime, and several others. SMS is a mobile technology that allows for sending and receiving text or even binary messages to and from a mobile phone. The relative ease of use of SMS makes it possible for a user to learn how to send SMS easily.

Schofield and Kubin (2002) argued that small devices could potentially provide better interface for finding information than through page browsing and other means. More than 160 billion SMS are exchanged each month in European countries (Mavrakis, 2004), and according to Resource Shelf (2006), 48.7 billion SMS messages were sent in the second half of 2005, which is up 50% on the six months before that. Nowadays, with 45 million short messages sent in the U.K. alone every day, a mobile phone that has the easiest interface for voice communication is likely to fail the user satisfaction test if it does not provide a reasonably good SMS interface. (Gorienko & Merrick, 2003)

The major advantage of SMS is its cost effectiveness, and availability, as most individuals own phone.

In different parts of the world, several service providers offer mobile services which include SMS. Most times the cost attached to sending a SMS is relatively small, and most providers do not charge when receiving SMS. Sometimes, service providers give users certain amount of free SMS per month, which allows customers send and receive unlimited number of SMS messages. It is possible to acquire a special dedicated line that uses a custom rate for messages sent to the number; it is also possible to have a number as toll free, making it free for users to send SMS to the number. All these contribute to what makes SMS a really cost effective means of disseminating information.

Till today, especially in the developing countries, there still exists the problem of checking examination results as students still throng notice boards in anxiety. Although most universities, even those in the less developed countries now make examination results available on their websites. The level of internet availability in less developed countries is still low and quite expensive. Even in the developed countries where most homes have internet access, SMS is still a faster and cheaper means of dissemination examination results as well as other information. Pramsane and Sanjaya (2006) stated that universities can provide educational services based on SMS and Email such as grade release, enrollment information, university announcement and internship opportunity. An advantage SMS and Email offer is that students can receive valuable information on the fly without requesting for it.

The result checking system not only allows student to request for grades, it provides the result as soon as they as become available. This is done by pushing the result to the students (sending it to their phones and emails), or working on a request sent from a student to produce the result (pulling). There are two methods of SMS widely used in applications; they are the PUSH & PULL. This application can either be used to push or pull messages.

A Push SMS application is one whereby a message is been sent from the application to the user. It is a one way message. In other words, it is the mobile application (in this case, the SMS and Email result checking application) that initiates a message. An example could be a school that automatically sends examination results to the students and their parents/sponsors as soon as the grades become available. The users do not request for the grades, do not take any action and are not charged for receiving the SMS. The SMS would be delivered to them in a matter of seconds regardless of where they are, as long as their mobile phone is within their network operator’s coverage.