Mobile Learner Support

A quick post on this today, to be followed up with more detail once confirmed.

Mobile VLE v2 (for OU VLE2 = Moodle 2.x)
Development work on this has been proceeding at a very good pace, where pre-existing modules and themes are available. Some of the recent alterations to design work naturally rising from implementation are due to management of space on screen. In particular some tweaking has been made to the study planner view to improve any redundant spacing – remembering of course that the amount of content per block is flexible. Similarly, the ForumNG improvements have meant that the indenting of threads (which are an issue for some) have needed a re-think on mobile, which will be achieved by indicating the position in the thread by preceding bullets e.g.
. Original
.. Reply to original
… Reply to reply
.. 2nd Reply to original
etc.

Mainstreaming – support
Before any publicity or announcements are made on mobile support for our learning systems, we’d like to get a microsite up and running so that there is a blend of official guidance, but also self-help materials and embedded FAQs. In particular however, our students surveyed indicated a willingness to peer support on device specifics, so an unmoderated (but alertable) forum tool will be trialled for this purpose. I’m hoping that this work will be able to be developed before July for use over Summer 2011 and beyond.

Since I’ve recently been asked to update our current benchmarking against other learning systems from a mobile perspective, a few points have come home to me, even with a number of approaches having been underway for some time now.

In reviewing the current offerings available from Blackboard and the Moodle community there seems to be a distinct drive to support selected individual tools or activity modules. This is not completely compatible with an online distance learning environment that we need to support here, where increasing proportions of learning design, scaffolding and signposting are placed online as the suggested student pathway through curriculum material. Where previously there was a larger emphasis on guidance through course texts and in face-to-face sessions, both our desktop and mobile access need to provide some sort of consistency in packaging all this together – ideally in regular manageable chunks.

Hence, we surveyed students not only to explore which features should be prioritised but also how to assist them in organising and keep on top of their studies. The core design for the new VLE2 [OU Moodle 2.x] is not radically different from the previous emphasis on the Study Planner, but this time both desktop and mobile views have been designed alongside rather than as a bolt-on.

Internally, there has been quite a bit of debate around whether to provide apps or mobile web implementations to support the learning activity, and given our range of users the mobile web came out as the more supportable and updatable option across a range of platforms. That’s not to say that there is no place for an app – as students told us: an easier sign in process, better media and resource handling (including contributions) are attractive, and some sort of ‘shell’ app might be a useful alignment with proposed work coming out of Moodle HQ.

The app or mobile web debate is also particularly pertinent for student-oriented services – which are more easily identified on campus-based institutions. Irrespective of the route taken, the major task still revolves around making the underlying data more available, feedable and consumable by different technologies. Distance learning institutions have some comparable sources of information even if there isn’t a relevant campus map or list of student activities onsite (see data.open). In some work undertaken by colleagues last year it did look as if at one point US institutions in particular were keen on mobile apps to deliver services, while those HEIs that had worked on this in the UK delivered via the mobile web, but this picture is changing.

Aside from the immediacy of cached information and better geolocation methods, the main benefits of apps in this case seem to be in the smaller amount of data that needs to be transferred to fill a predefined template, rather than load a whole environment. Of course any changes then to the data structure would have to be pushed as a notification to upgrade (for each platform) rather than immediately updated across the board.

In the OU, our Library Services have been ahead of the curve on this one for some time, making use of website traffic information and an earlier mobile service to enhance the next stage of development. What we need to do now is have a much better mobile entry point for enquirers as well as enhance that for current students. This again will be done via the mobile web, though there is some prototyping of consuming the same web services through apps already.

The main point to take forward in mainstreaming mobile learner support will be to inform novices about the potential data costs so that they can sort out a better mobile package if needed (or use WiFi only). Generic support is also the intention, with an aim to provide spaces for peer support and self-help for device specifics. Once we have released the basic provision as a ‘student entitlement’ across the board, then work can resume on finding more curriculum-specific approaches to tailor and optimise further.

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.