Mobile Learner Support

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!

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.

The next in this series of features is to extend the ‘launchpad’ view indicating any forums with unread messages with a much better optimised view of all discussions and threaded messages. In addition, some management and notification features have also been maintained where possible.

In the examples above, the user can see there is one (of four) forums with unread messages, and click on the ‘View all forums’ link to see the Forums block view. Alternatively, the user can click on the specific forum link that will go to the relevant forum (with unread messages) as below.

The second example has many more discussions with unread messages (which are indicated in the middle column of the table). {I’m also demonstrating one simple but powerful benefit to Android over iOS – customising the browser options and sizes!} On clicking through to a specific discussion the default threaded view is displayed, along with the default collapsed view for read messages.

Unread messages are displayed in full and use a darker blue shade to differentiate them – it is also possible to jump back and forth between these unread messages. Replying calls up a basic text entry field for short messages.

Despite WebKit support for the standard rich-text entry fields, we didn’t find the experience consistently usable enough, so device detection has been required to only display the basic entry forms (although HTML markup would be supported). We have not at this stage enabled the facility to add images, since this is also part of the WYSIWYG toolbar.

For more information on ForumNG try here, or here.

In addition to the previously optimised Resource Pages, Structured Content is the primary means of managing and creating content to be rendered onto course/module websites, as well as ‘alternative formats’ that are increasingly available [PDFs, DAISY, ePub, MP3, Word, Print].

The main work required here was to establish a means for the navigation to be separated but easily accessible from the content, which was achieved as illustrated below:

While most of the Structured Content web views render faithfully (apart from Glossary, not covered this time), more work will need to be undertaken in resolving drag-and-drop activities and alternates to Flash in some cases. Embedded audiovisual content will not display in the player, on screen, but the assets are also hyperlinked so that a more appropriate app can handle these.

In addition to this and the alternative format work going on in parallel (particularly that in improving ‘rich media’ ePub eBooks), there has also been some prototyping work on Android to establish packages of HTML content for syncing offline into an app – which required further work on handling audiovisual content. More on this later, as an update to a prior post on the ‘shell application’, also covered in Anthony Forth’s UK MoodleMoot presentation [see MoodleNews for more].