Mobile Learning Winter Festival [IET 18th/19th Jan 2011]
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.