Maintaining a predictable course experience across thousands of learners, hundreds of device types, and scores of service providers is no small feat. After rigorous testing we've opted to deliver text-based courses as MMS messages.
While SMS is the original form of text message, MMS has emerged as the most popular messaging type. SMS messages are capped at 160 characters. Messages longer than 160 characters are handed in variable ways by cell service providers. While SMS is often reliable in practice sending longer messages that are broken up and "chained" together can lead to unintentional shifts in the order in which recipients receive texts. Additionally, for SMS multimedia is sent as a separate text that are often more bandwidth intensive, at times complicating the order in which course intro messages or graphics are delivered.
The benefits of delivering text messaging-based courses via MMS include:
- MMS is handled in a more uniform way across providers
- MMS handles longer text messages better, preserving the order in which they were delivered
- MMS works for a variety of multimedia types
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