The future of QR codes is yet to be determined as students and faculty attempt to integrate this technology with daily life.
Dr. James D. Langford, director of innovation and implementation, said he always is hearing of new ways people are using the codes. Some stores are offering more product information through QR codes. At ACU, some instructors have students scan the codes to link to faculty evaluations on their mobile devices, thus eliminating errors.
“It’s the nature of innovation and the diffusion of it that it starts small and grows and gets big,” Langford said. “The goal is to understand, is this going to be a useful innovation and what are the creative ways people are going to come up with to use it?”
Many students don’t use QR codes or see the practicality of them when the information given in the code is often redundant.
Jeremy Foo, sophomore advertising and public relations and political science major from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, said he thinks the QR code initiative will be practical only if people actually use the codes.
“I think it has the potential to be very useful because you can compact tons of information into an entire link in a tiny box,” Foo said. “But it needs to be interactive.”
Langford said as of two weeks ago, there were about 1200 downloads of the getGo application that ACU offered to students and faculty free of charge. The app is normally $2.
There have been about 680 URLs created using go.acu.edu, which can create several different types of data, but Langford said URLs have been the primary type.
Incorporating the codes into practical use is in the hands of those creating the codes, Langford said. If they are turning a URL into a code without any new information, those scanning will not find it helpful and most likely will not bother to scan again, Langford said.
“There are some QR codes that are very repetitive,” Foo said. “They have the entire poster then, ‘Scan here for digital poster.’ No; I’ll pass. It’s kind of impractical.”
Foo said in his home country of Malaysia, many mass-produced publications use QR codes.
Some U.S. companies are doing the same. Langford showed the Optimist a recent issue of Wired magazine in which an advertisement featured a QR code that linked to an application for the company’s product. The application was for a Mini Cooper and was a just-for-fun type of app.
That’s how Spenser Lynn, sophomore physics major from White Oak, views QR codes as a whole – just for fun.
“I think they’re a great novelty,” Lynn said.
Lynn expressed his concern, however, for the opportunities QR codes can give to cyberterrorists with unidentifiable codes and shortened URLs that potentially could link to dangerous websites.
“People will come up and scan them and you won’t know what website you’re going to until you scan it,” Lynn said. “It’s just silly. This is probably the silliest thing I’ve seen ACU do.”
But with ACU’s code creator, students and faculty must input their information into the system so ACU knows who makes each code for accountability.
“It’s kind of what you predict, that any time you have something new you’re going to have a smaller number that are early adopters and they’ll jump right on and try something new,” Langford said. “Then as time goes on, you have more people making a conscious decision to adopt or not to adopt.”
