Mobile Learner Support

Since the beta release of what we’re now loosely calling Mobile VLE v1 (aligning with OU VLE1 which is on Moodle 1.9.x), the development team has received a number of very positive responses to the implementation, with a few requests and suggestions.

In addition, some key findings from the most recent Oct 2010 survey included the following:

• Use of ‘dead time’, mobile use also includes that on sofa
• Mobile phone contracts predominate [from current user sample]
  
• Usage: Touch phones (up) Smart phone (down)
• Device change in 2 years, not 18 months – possibly contract related
  
• Surveyed users largely Tablet agnostics [at the time]
  

• Assessment [scores] remain a key driver
• More frequent visits via mobile over the 2010 period
• Reading updates and forums are the most completed activity
• Accessing different parts of Study Planner important [validating 'launchpad']
  
• Switching view or mode depending on requirement [make as easy as possible]
  

• Downloadable resources preferred in standard formats
• OU app for adding multimedia desireable rather than 3rd party/intermediates
  
• Self-help, FAQ-based and crowd-sourced online support sufficient for device-specifics
  

User testing on some of the new designs has taken place and these have been refined to the point that a concerted effort is now in place to prototype and implement new features on OU VLE2 (Moodle 2.x) in preparation for staged rollout from the end of 2011. This is alongside migrating the design rules and principles to existing OU Moodle modules.

Samples of the latest designs below show the improved ‘launchpad’ view – with increased user customisation on being able to show or hide specific sections and also some new features such as contextual notes and better switching between views. The OU mobile header and footer will also be standardised in parallel with learning systems development.

Some of the above was shared at a recent m-Libraries workshop on ‘Evolving Mobile Content’ with JISC and a number of educational publishers. The relevant slides are also available.

We have also been able to report that use of [handheld] mobile devices is now consistently around 10% of the student body on the StudentHome portal, with ~6/10ths of those converting through to use of the Mobile VLE v1 – over 11,000 individuals both months in 2011 so far.

Tablet use is also now increasing to around 2% of the student body – so mobile use exceeding that of our Mac user base, while tablet use is on par with that of Linux.

The last two days provided a useful opportunity for members of the OU Mobile Learner Support/Mobile Learning community to see what new work is planned and underway across the university. More importantly I feel though is that this was also a good opportunity for folk less familiar with work in this area to see that this isn’t a niche activity any longer, and that much of the work underway will be for the benefit of a mainstream audience.

Thanks go to Agnes Kukulska-Hulme, Daisy Mwanza-Simwami and the team in the Institute of Educational Technology for pulling the event together, and hopefully new project information will make its way soon to http://www.open.ac.uk/mobisite

Project stands included many areas with online resources to follow up, listed on Cloudworks at http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/4967

From the perspective of institutional support, it was great to be able to say that real inroads are being made into providing updates to more mobile-friendly learning and public-facing sites using Moodle and Drupal respectively. For the Mobile VLE in particular, some concept screenshots from the recent usability-tested wireframes were also on show:

At the same time, we could also relate that in December 2010, student mobile usage had now increased (possibly somewhat due to exam results time) to ~19.2K individual accesses to StudentHome via handheld devices (about 10% of students online that month) and ~9.3K mobile users of the [moodle] VLE.

Quicker than expected, thanks to some rapid work on the accelerated development programme (so yes, faster and faster) there are now early proposals that were shared with an internal audience at our Berrill event last Thursday.

Stewart Nixon, the project manager for the next phase of Mobile VLE development for Moodle v2.x shared the below with me (click on the image to see an annotated version):

Currently, the idea is for more basic phones to receive an updated version of the current ‘launchpad’ view, while higher-end devices will also get a tabbed view of key areas of module [course] content and activities.

The proposal, along with a series of suggested designs, will be usability tested later this week, and more updates will follow after that.

Following an interim review of our latest mobile survey to students (outline available here soon I’m sure ), we have looked at the very positive feedback on our current mobile-optimised implementation of OU-customised Moodle views and modules, and also indicators for future directions.

As part of an accelerated development plan running through to next summer, we are going to refactor and improve the implementation we had on Moodle v1.9.x for Moodle v2.x in line with other work already underway.

On a technical level, our developer Anthony Forth has posted a proposal to the Moodle community at: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=162872 which I hope will start to help us standardise an approach that will be of wider use beyond our original customised work.

More information and initial (re)design work will follow soon in the new year!

A number of activities are now underway, but again in order to ground these in actual student requirements, the follow up survey on mobile use and feedback on the work to date is going on at the moment.

A student survey is again being held from StudentHome mobile, so staff who are also students are welcome to contribute (signing in with a student ID to see the notice), with a closing date of 1st Nov 2010.

I will be discussing interim points of note with colleagues in the mobile learning community next week at the mLearn 2010 conference as part of the poster session that’s been prepared.

Fuller results, and an update of current work will also be shared with our Mobile Technologies Special Interest Group on the 28th Oct 2010. The outline agenda is as below:

1.       Feedback from student survey – overview of current usage patterns and future indicators

2.       Validating development work for the RAP mobile strand, including discussing mobile web and apps and synergies elsewhere

3.       Open updates on project work/interest areas

4.       Capturing and sharing information and practice online via ‘mobisite’ http://www.open.ac.uk/mobisite

Note that I’m hoping the mobisite will be fully live imminently – at least in its basic state, to validate and start to input more content.

To reinforce the latest release of the Mobile VLE, students today will be seeing a short update on their StudentHome mobile portal.

The key messages are to introduce new functionality with regard to module (course) materials and also changes to the collaborative tools.

Other notes include a reminder of the ability to change to ‘desktop’ view if needed and that there are indicators against some areas of learning content that are still unoptimised at present.

The status of the Mobile VLE is still ‘beta’ until other work has been undertaken to provide support and self-help reference materials. To aid in this and future work, a survey will be posted in the next couple of weeks.

Now that I’ve covered the new features, I’ve gone back and checked a few of the basics, and thought that there were some other additions that were worth mentioning:

• Other news feed [RSS] blocks display in addition to Course News, and they appear in a priority order as laid out on the desktop (not alphabetical)
• The yellow ‘View all messages in full’ and ‘View all forums’ bars were reduced in prominence
• ForumNG now only displays ‘Unread posts’ rather than the actual number shown previously on the old forums, but the Mobile VLE will inherit whatever is decided there, long term
• Study Planner displays the course default – whether 3,5,9 weeks or all (if no calendar weeks are defined). The show/hide arrow indicators are used to expand or collapse other weeks in turn
• New icons are being used as a precursor to some overall OU theme design changes
• We have added a ‘desktop only’ icon – – which indicates where we recommend a resource or activity to be used on a desktop, since this either:
  • does not currently render well on mobiles, or has not been optimised
  • will not actually work on mobiles (e.g. Elluminate, using Java)

  In order to give the option to students as to whether to partly attempt something that may not work for them and may have a higher data cost.

• Tick boxes appear only when applied on a course, and then trigger the ‘Your progress’ contextual help

At this point, I should also note that the Mobile VLE is not officially supported at this stage – mainly responding to current student usage of mobile devices in accessing learning materials. A separate body of work will involve establishing support arrangements and publicity to a wider (possibly novice) group of users – e.g. to clarify the cost of mobile data that might be incurred and for users to investigate this before making full use of the mobile internet.

UPDATE: we were also asked to make the Resources more obvious, but this led to some very long lists of links in some cases. The Resources block will now be moved to be below the Study Planner to better accommodate this without getting in the way of the updated materials.

Since I started this latest series of blog articles with reference to the student survey that gave us the indicators for priority areas for development, I’ll wrap up by going back to this (originally referred to in the student rating blog post).

So, in order of priority for development, now complete:

• Assessment – scores available more rapidly on StudentHome mobile portal as a result of parallel development
• Messages – course messages and quick view of forums with unread posts on ‘launchpad’ view, ForumNG also optimised
• Tasks – ‘tick-boxes’ can be used to keep track of progress, preserved on both mobile and desktop views
• Planner – the course planner ‘launchpad’ view is optimised to display the current week, but also a quick view of 3, 5 or 9 weeks of activity, depending on course settings. There is also an entire-course view available, and courses without calendar weeks display in full
• Resources – resource pages and the resource block are optimised and where mobile devices can handle downloadable resource files these will work in addition to Structured Content

To complete the collaborative tools provision, we also included OUWikis and OUBlogs which cross over between tasks, activities and resources.

Remaining areas for development:

• Calendar – on hold subject to work with Google Apps
• Search – will follow from a separate integrated search project
• Glossary – should be able to be done in next development round
• Objectives – learning objectives are usually implemented as resources, but could be drawn out subject to further verification

A follow up student survey will be available on StudentHome mobile, as before, once the successful release of these new features have been made available in September 2010, where we will also query further the demand for quizzes, eBooks and mobile apps.
In conclusion, many sincere thanks go to Anthony Forth in being able to bring some of this mobile development work ahead of schedule, and for his thoroughness in checking through the latest additions to our mobile-optimised featureset.

The last module that has been updated this time is the OUblog, which is used in three ways on the OU VLE [Moodle] – as a tool for personal reflection or learning journal, as a shared activity* with others, or as part of a course with multiple student contributors.

Whichever access and updating method is used, the mobile version of the blog is the same – simply rendered (again no image upload nor avatar), with plain text editing and commenting features.

Blog details are also available (which would be a separate column on the desktop view), containing an overview, tags, blogroll/links and feed options. In addition as with all the collaborative tools, the contributing user’s name is hyperlinked to their profile (if visible) and can also be viewed in a mobile-optimised format.

* Note that the ‘Shared Activities’ area currently isn’t optimised – but all the tools themselves will pick up the mobile layout (for ForumNG, OUwiki, OUblog) once you’re past the overview page listing the activities you’ve created alongside those that are shared with you.

Looking through the wiki, I realise how much more friendly it seems than MediaWiki – anyhow, despite the dates of the sample content in the screengrabs below being a bit old, rest assured that the version of the OUwiki module is as up to date as possible.

We haven’t included all the tabs nor some of the more complex tools (such as ‘Save to MyStuff’ and the reporting views available to staff). We’re also using ‘Wiki changes’ rather than the history function as a summary.

In addition to creating new sections and pages, the wiki content can also be edited in plain text mode (though this can throw up some odd layout and markup issues).

We’ve also optimised the ‘Wiki index’ and ‘Wiki changes’ views to give an overview of any updates and group interaction, but unfortunately the comparison view of any changes, while present, is in desktop-only mode [side-by-side].

Again, the aim of this feature is more as a quick overview on changes and progress as well as reading resources. Contributing content is possible at a small scale, but additions of imagery etc. are out of scope for now.