The following case studies illustrate two approaches to how an HE institution and a distance learning institution have adopted Moodle to deliver mobile learning. Both institutions were very early movers in making Moodle mobile-friendly, and can be seen as torch bearers for the rest of us. Fortunately, both institutions have also been influential in the approach that Moodle HQ have taken to mobile compatibility, so in using the new mobile features in recent versions of Moodle, we are all able to take advantage of the substantial amount of work that went into these two sites.
The University of Sussex is a research-led HE institution on the south coast of England. They use a customized Moodle 1.9 installation called Study Direct, which plays host to 1,500 editing tutors and 15,000 students across 2,100 courses per year, and receives 13,500 unique hits per day.
The e-learning team at the University of Sussex contains five staff (one manager, two developers, one user support, and one tutor support) whose remit covers a much wider range of learning technologies beyond the VLE. However, the team has achieved a great deal with limited resources. It has been working towards a responsive design for some years and has helped to influence the direction of Moodle with regards to designing for mobile devices and usability, through speaking at UK Moodle and HE conferences and providing passionate inputs into debates on the Moodle forums on the subject of interface design. Further to this, team member Stuart Lamour is one of the three original developers of the Bootstrap theme for Moodle, which is used throughout this book.
The Study Direct site shows what is possible in Moodle, given the time and resources for its development and a focus on user-centered design. The approach has been to avoid going down the native application route for mobile access like many institutions have done, and to instead focus on a responsive, browser-based user experience.
The login page is simple and clean. One of the nice things that the University of Sussex has done is to think through the user interactions on its site and clearly identify calls to action, typically with a green button, as shown by the sign in button on the login page in the following screenshot:
The team has built its own responsive theme for Moodle. While the team has taken a leading role on development of the Moodle 2 Bootstrap theme, the University of Sussex site is still on Moodle 1.9 so this implementation uses its own custom theme. This theme is fully responsive and looks good when viewed on a tablet or a smartphone, reordering screen elements as necessary for each screen resolution.
The course page, shown in the following screenshot, is similarly clear and uncluttered. The editing interface has been customized quite heavily to give tutors a clear and easy way to edit their courses without running the risk of messing up the user interface. The team maintains a useful and informative blog explaining what they have done to improve the user experience, and which is well worth a read.
The Open University (OU) in the UK runs one the largest Moodle sites in the world. It is currently using Moodle 2 for the OU's main VLE as well as for its OpenLearn and Qualifications online platforms. Its Moodle implementation regularly sees days with well over one million transactions and over 60,000 unique users, and has seen peak times of 5,000 simultaneous online users.
The OU's focus on mobile Moodle goes back to about 2010, so it was an early mover in this area. This means that the OU did not have the benefit of all the mobile-friendly features that now come with Moodle, but had to largely create its own mobile interface from scratch.
Anthony Forth gave a presentation at the UK Moodle Moot in 2011 on the OU's approach to mobile interface design for Moodle. He identified that at the time the Open University migrated to Moodle 2 in 2011 it had over 13,000 mobile users per month.
The OU chose to survey a group of 558 of these users in detail to investigate their needs more closely. It transpired that the most popular uses of Moodle on mobile devices was for forums, news, resources and study planners, while areas such as wikis and blogs were very low down the list of users' priorities. So the OU's mobile design focused on these particular areas as well as looking at usability in general.
The preceding screenshot shows the OU course page with tabbed access to the popular areas such as Planner, News, Forums, and Resources, and then the main content area providing space for latest news, unread forum posts, and activities taking place this week.
The site uses a nice, clean, and easy to understand user interface in which a lot of thought has gone into the needs of the student.