e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: mLearning

  • Please Welcome Guest Blogger Laura Czerniewicz

    With all the blogging I’ve been doing about mLearning apps the past couple of weeks, it has bothered me that the focus in the industry right now has been on the high-end devices. How many people in the entire world own an iPad right now? Maybe 300,000? I really wanted to learn more about how we can use the least-common-denominator cell phones that six out of every ten people own worldwide. I wanted to learn more about how mobile learning works in places where everyone doesn’t have an iPhone.

    I am pleased to announce that Laura Czerniewicz, Director of the Centre for Educational Technology (CET) at the University of Cape Town, will be writing a series of guest posts to educate us in this area. I have been a fan of Laura’s on Twitter and, more recently, her blog. You may also be interested in her bio and her research.

  • Blackboard's iPad App and its implications

    Ray Henderson has a post up about his sense of responsibility to customers regarding balancing innovation with mature products (careful refinements in features and support services to meet customer needs) versus innovation in new areas (bold thinking and experiments). It’s vintage Ray—thoughtful, balanced, and customer-focused. And while Ray is always the first person to admit that words and deeds do not amount to the same thing, I suspect that Blackboard customers are going to be pleased to hear the company’s leadership talking this way.

    Ray also unwrapped a demo video of Blackboard’s new iPad application:

    Honestly, this looks like a promising app. If I were a student or faculty member heavily using Blackboard and had an iPad, I would want it. I would go further and say that if I were a student or faculty member heavily using Blackboard and thinking about buying an iPad, I might find this app to be an additional motivator to buy one. One common weakness of LMSs is that they don’t always make multitasking easy. Blackboard’s iPad app appears to help in that area. Of course, we don’t know just how much functionality is covered, which is critical. But conceptually speaking, I find the execution to be appealing. The LMS may not be your bag, but if you have to use one heavily, then this may not be a bad way to go.

    Let’s tease out a few additional implications:

  • Advice for mLearning App Developers

    My colleague Mark Wilcox, now the product manager for Oracle Virtual Directory but formerly a developer at WebCT, wrote me with some good advice to mLearning developers:

    I wrote the first mobile app for WebCT as my last presentation at WebCT’s user conference before leaving. That may have been the first ever mobile app for any LMS, now that I think about it.

    Here is the advice I would give for apps that are thinking of a mobile strategy:

    1. Focus on having a decent experience using the Android and iPhone browser. Luckily it’s basically the same browser. Nozbe – which is a new Getting Things Done service – does this very well. I have it linked off my iPhone home screen and it looks/acts just alike an app at that point.
    2. If your app has data that updates – for example discussion forums, calendar reminders, notices of new assignments – make sure those area available as RSS/Atom feeds. This makes it possible to consume them in a number of different formats and opens possibility to get a mobile app using one of the app-generation services like AppMaker or MobileRoadie.
    3. I would stick with a mobile web only strategy unless you have a true compelling reason to build an app. One reason could be that you need to send push notifications – a mobile Web can’t yet do that, but a mobile app can. Another could be to control the brand experience. For example you don’t want people to have a bad idea about your product because you let a 3rd party app be the mobile app and it’s not implemented well. I wouldn’t try to prevent those apps if you have a public API , but I would want to make sure I had the best app optimizing the experience. I think EBay has done this particularly well. Oracle has also released a few iPhone apps which give an idea of how to take subsets of functionality and optimize them for the mobile phone.

  • A Closer Look at Mobile App Development for Higher Education

    I have been blogging a fair bit lately about the competing mLearning efforts between Blackboard and the Moodle community. Much of the conversation so far has focused on the front end apps and whether web-based or native apps are better. (The latest is that there is a native iPhone app for Moodle in addition to the mobile browser app.) But let’s be clear: Many of the smartphone apps you have for your iPhone, Android, Blackberry, or whatever were built by lone developers working part time. I don’t want to trivialize that work, but it’s hard to see how one platform is going to achieve a durable competitive advantage against the others based on its mobile client.

    I’m going to draw on some recent conversations about mobile apps in the Sakai community to reflect a little on what it takes to build an mLearning platform. In the process, I’ll also think out loud about what kind of a business this area will or will not sustain in the long run.

    (more…)

  • Moodle Mobile vs. Blackboard Mobile Learn: Web App vs. Native

    I was incorrect when I wrote that Moodle Mobile would have an Android-native client. Carlos Kiyan, a member of the Moodle Mobile team, clarified for me over Twitter that Moodle Mobile is a web app which has, for the moment, focused on WebKit-based browsers. (Both the iPhone and Android have default browsers that are WebKit-based.) Sorry for missing that; I should have looked at those videos more closely. Meanwhile, Kayvon Beykpour of the Blackboard Mobile Learn team has written a blog post that talks about their decision to go with native clients.

    As you might expect, each team thinks their approach is better. The Moodle Mobile team thinks that the web-based approach is more portable and will allow them to reach more smart phones. They think that the main gap between web-based and native apps is working offline, and they have developed offline caching for their app using a third-party product. (HTML 5, which both Google and Apple are promoting, will support offline capabilities, but it is not clear when this will be practically available in mobile browsers.) The Blackboard Mobile Learn team claims that native apps will allow them to provide a better user experience. To be honest, I don’t know much about mobile app development and have no intuitions about who is right. I have been impressed with the quality of Google’s Buzz mobile web app, but I don’t assume that the approach will work for everything that you’d want to do in an app. We’ll have to see once the Blackboard Mobile Learn team has their app out whether they are doing interesting things that a web app can’t do.

    Regarding portability, there’s a long term and a short term issue. In the short term, Blackboard will have a Blackberry app while Moodle won’t. I suspect that the market share for Blackberries among college students is pretty low, even in the United States. On the other hand, it’s not always about numbers. If, for example, you have an important executive education program offered by your business school, then Blackberry support will matter a lot. In the long term, I suspect that the web app approach will be more portable and allow the developers to keep up on more platforms with fewer resources. But we’ll see. This is a very young market.

    Update: It appears that Blackberry plans to have a WebKit-based browser in the near future.

    Later Update: Carlos Kiyan pointed me in the direction of this article, which outlines the pros and cons of both native and web app approaches.

  • Moodle Mobile Now Developing an Android Native Client

    Well, I guess it’s mLearning Week here at e-Literate. Just a day after I noted that the main difference we are aware of between the Moodle mobile clients and the forthcoming Blackboard Mobile Learn client is that Blackboard plans to have native apps for Android and Blackberry, the Moodle folks announce progress on a native Android app. Let the arms race begin!

    Update: I have just been informed by a member of the Moodle mobile development team that both the iPhone app and the Android app are, in fact, web apps and not platform-native apps. That wasn’t obvious to me at all on casual viewing (especially with the iPhone, where I have no first-hand experience and didn’t recognize the browser chrome). It will be interesting to see how much of a difference that makes in terms of user experience, particularly with Google and Apple both pushing HTML 5.  Anyway, the mobile web app has been tested for Android, but is not Android-native.

    By the way, the helpful people at Blackboard’s P.R. firm referred me to this study at Ball State University showing that, as of about six months ago, 38.5% of their students own smart phones, and 18% (or roughly half of the students with smart phones) owned iPhones. No word on the Blackberry/Android breakdown, which probably has changed in the past six months anyway due to the new Android phones on the market. I am quite sure that there is a lot of variability from school to school, based on demographic, socio-economic, and geographic factors.

    There’s actually some interesting mobile work being done by University of Cape Town in South Africa, but it focuses on text messages rather than whizzy smart phone apps. (I strongly suspect that UCT has a lower percentage of smart phone users with unlimited data plans than Ball State does.) I’m looking into the possibility of getting a guest post on this topic at some point. (That’s a hint, Stephen.)

  • Moodle Mobile vs. Blackboard Mobile Learn

    Blackboard just announced the planned availability (in June) of Blackboard Mobile Learn:

    Blackboard Inc. (Nasdaq: BBBB) today announced plans for Blackboard Mobile Learn(TM), an application that will bring two-way teaching and learning to mobile devices, creating an interactive mobile learning experience for students and teachers on the go.Blackboard’s existing Blackboard Mobile Central(TM) application already delivers a mobile campus experience that includes news, events, maps and sports among a range of student life and service options.

    Blackboard Mobile Learn will take the next step by bringing the classroom experience and learning content to the mobile environment, arming campuses with a high quality option to quickly meet the growing demand from students who want to do more with their smart phones and other Web-enabled devices.

    From what we know so far, the main difference between this and the Moodle mobile offerings is that Blackboard plans to have native clients for Android and Blackberry while Moodle so far only provides a Java-based client for non-iPhone mobile phones. (Does anybody have market share data on smart phones for the college aged demographic?) We won’t know if there are actual functional differences until Blackboard releases more details.