What is Mesh and why does it exist?

Think smarter Slack combined with Google for University communication and collaboration.

What

Mesh is a software application (an app) that enables members of a University community (students, faculty, staff, alumni, etc) to connect, communicate, and collaborate through instant messaging and file sharing, as well as search for people, resources, and information that exists within their University ecosystem.

Although Mesh is an app, we don’t typically refer to it as such, and here’s why.

Mesh is a software application with thousands of lines of code, robust data streams, complex architecture, and many features. Also, Mesh is multi-platform and can be used across any Internet-enabled device, such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops, and smartwatches. From our perspective, the term “app” doesn’t do it justice.

Why

The need for this product was identified when my business partner, Tsavo, and I were undergraduates at Miami University (OH). As students who grew up with the Internet and instant messaging, we were struck with one simple problem.

“If I want to send one text message to my entire class right now, I don’t have the ability to do that.”

We came to realize that there does not exist a scalable, reliable and organized real-time communication and collaboration platform for a University setting.

Students, faculty, and staff rely on different tools in small-scale, siloed adoptions, which creates gaps in communication, secluded members, and the inability to access one another reliably. This problem is represented by the image below.

Over the years, the idea for Mesh evolved as we observed and experienced additional challenges on campus that we believed to be a derivative of failed interpersonal communication.

We saw:

• Professors struggling to get students to participate in conversations
• Students disengaged during classroom and campus activities
• Students from the same class fail to acknowledge each other while passing each other on campus
• Students departing the classroom and going their separate ways without saying a word to one another; no conversation
• Professors responding to email inquiries 3 weeks later
• E-mail inboxes with over 12,000+ unread emails
• Students pass lists around the classroom to gather personal phone numbers so their class could communicate; not everyone gets the list
• Students who broke down in tears and/or transferred because they failed to find their sense of belonging
• When all said and done, we knew a small handful of the thousands of students enrolled at our University. Why couldn’t we meet more?

We met with hundreds of other students and faculty who shared our experiences, so we set out to fix it.

Today, Mesh is a communication and collaboration platform built — from the ground up — to fuel conversations, facilitate collaboration, and help instill a sense of community for students, faculty, and staff in Higher Ed.

Mesh bridges the gaps between groups on campus to help ensure smooth, reliable communication and collaboration from day one. This is represented by the image below.

How

Every University has multiple systems to help manage student, faculty, and staff information.

1. Student Information System (SIS)
2. Enterprise Resource Planning System (ERP)
3. Learning Management System (LMS)

We leverage this structured information through software integrations to populate Mesh with users, groups, and information immediately upon login.

For example, if I’m a student enrolled in ENG 112, BUS 101, and MGT 111, and I live in Dennison Hall, Mesh will automatically create a group communication channel for each class and include all other members of the said class or residence hall in the group.

This means no sharing personal phone numbers and no more relying on email in order to communicate. Through Mesh, users have access to every member of their University. Most importantly, the members that are relevant to them.

Now we finally have the ability to send one simple text message to the entire class.

What’s special about Mesh is that it extends far beyond the classroom. Mesh is great for a residence hall, student organization, intramural team, department, committee, online class, or any other classification of a group.

At Mesh, we refer to these groups as Communities. To learn more about Communities, please click here.

Through Mesh, ongoing conversations can happen, resource sharing can happen, and access to learning support can happen.

Through Mesh, students, faculty, and staff are able to build tighter relationships with one another, thus resulting in a newfound sense of community — both on a macro and micro level. This sense of community is what binds us not only to each other but to our campus environment.

The Result

The following quotes are unsolicited testimonials from students who have been participating in the Mesh beta at Miami University. For privacy purposes, we will not disclose the name of the students.

“I really wish I would have had Mesh my whole time here, even just using it this semester, it definitely feels like it’s improved the way my class’ interactions have developed.”

“My experience with Mesh has improved tremendously, and I keep wishing I could use Mesh for some of my other classes.”

“Mesh makes group projects and out-of-classroom communication unbelievably simple. I wish I would have been able to use this years ago.”

Conclusion

As Universities move more towards online education, the need for real-time campus communication and collaboration has become even more prevalent. Not only is this how today’s students wish to communicate, but this is how today’s businesses communicate, too.

To learn more about our mission, click here. To learn how Mesh plays into the current trends of Higher Education, click here. For more information about Mesh, please visit our website at https://meshmycampus.com. To get in touch with the Mesh team, contact us at hello@mesh-hq.com.