e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Moodle

  • Moodle 2: File Import from and Export to Cloud Apps

    Gavin Henrick has a useful blog that publishes information about the ongoing development of Moodle 2. I was particularly interested in how Moodle will handle sharing files with consumer web apps like Google Docs and Flickr. Lucky for me, Gavin has a couple of screencasts covering the topic. Here’s some info about importing docs from external repositories:

    It’s a pretty intuitive UI that borrows heavily from desktop file picking interfaces. Moodle 2 integrates with an impressive list of external repositories:

    • YouTube
    • Alfresco
    • Box.net
    • Flickr
    • Google Docs
    • Mahara
    • MERLOT
    • Picasa
    • Remote Moodle installations
    • Amazon S3
    • WebDAV repositories
    • Wikimedia servers
    • File systems

    The repository API supports plugins for other repositories, so this list should grow over time.

    Moodle 2 also supports export to repositories in either HTML or LEAP2A format:

    This is also nicely done, but it doesn’t go far enough, in my view. A fundamental flaw in LMS design is that the course, rather than the student, owns course documents. While it’s great that Moodle makes it easy to export course contributions to places where students can hold onto them after the course gets archived, this mechanism relies on students making specific efforts to save their work. I would prefer to see a system in which the canonical copies of student-created course documents (or faculty-created course documents, for that matter) live in the users’ private file storage space and the course instance is granted permission to access them. By default, students hold onto all of their contributions after the course is archived.

    At any rate, if this is representative of the kind of improvement that is going into Moodle 2, it is likely to be an impressive release.

  • Blackboard Mobile Learn: More on Web vs. Native Development

    Update: Literally a minute after I published this, Scott Wilson tweeted about this Slideshare presentation about the relative advantages of web-native development for smartphones.

    Thanks to George Kroner for this link to data on student mobile phone usage at University of Edinburgh. Now, this is just one data point, so we have to be careful not to overgeneralize. However, what strikes me about the survey, in addition to the high usage of smart phones in general, is how different the market share numbers are from the U.S. In this survey, Nokia has a full 25% of smartphone market share—substantially more than RIM has. Nokia’s smartphones run Symbian, an operating system that barely registers in the U.S. in terms of market share. It would appear that smartphone market share can be highly variable across different markets.

    This may be one reason why the growth in mobile touch-friendly web sites is far outstripping the growth in native mobile apps:

    Source: Taptu via GigaOm

    Even within the United States, smartphone market share has been highly volatile. Consider this graph from The New York Times:

    Source: The New York Times

    We tend to forget that, just three years ago, Palm was at the top of the U.S. smartphone market and Apple didn’t have a smartphone. Given that Palm has just been purchased by HP, Microsoft is coming out with a ground-up rewrite of their mobile operating system, and Android is gaining traction fast, making a bet that you know which phones are going to be hot three years from now and developing a separate native app for each of them can be a risky and expensive proposition.

    This is part of what makes the Blackboard vs. Moodle dueling mobile strategies interesting. Blackboard has chosen the more expensive native app approach and is charging extra for the capability (a decision that Ray Henderson felt a need to justify in his recent blog post). Moodle has several different approaches being developed by various parties, but the one most closely associated with the Moodle community management is web-native and (of course, given that it’s open source) free. In terms of mobile functionality, we have no real evidence that one platform is leading the other, although I suspect that they will remain close to comparable for the short to medium term.

    I have no doubt that Blackboard will make some Mobile Learn sales in the short term (although, given that they don’t break out their sales in their earnings reports anymore, we’ll have no way to know how many Mobile Learn versus Mobile Central sales they make, or how many mobile sales they make in the aggregate). The question is how much pressure will they come under how quickly from their customer base to bundle this capability for free as their competitor does. And will their native app approach yield them a competitive edge that enables them to continue to charge, or will it turn out to be a financial millstone around their necks as they are forced to continue the higher-cost development strategy to provide a free application?

  • Moodle 2.0 Versus Blackboard 9.0/9.1

    Here’s a video highlighting some of the features in Moodle 2.o, which is expected to be released some time in the next couple of months:

    You can see a video of Blackboard 9.1 highlights here. (Sorry, it’s not embeddable.) Note that neither of these videos are “official”; they are both made by adopters.

    It’s interesting to note that the highlights list of the Moodle 2.0 release has a fair bit of overlap with the highlights of the Blackboard 9.0 and 9.1 releases:

    • Both tout improved usability
    • Specific improvements in test creation usability
    • Both now support searching for and embedding external media (e.g., YouTube videos, Creative Commons-licensed photographs, etc.) within their UIs.
    • Both now support mobile clients
    • Wikis (new in Blackboard 9.0, improved in Moodle 2.0)
    • Improved support for blogs

    Developing a good LMS is hard and I happen to think that both development teams have done some good work on improving their respective platforms. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to feel a little bit of that frustration of the edupunks when looking at these highlights. For example, I have been able to search for and embed videos and images inside of WordPress for years now. There is a balance that needs to be struck between creating a coherent, supportable environment and getting out of the way of the unbelievable pace of innovation on the consumer web. We’re making some progress toward that balance, but we’re clearly not there yet.

  • 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.

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  • 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.