While at present there is no single unifying Mobile Strategy for the whole of the OU, some portfolios and units have a common understanding and are undertaking to align efforts.
An underlying ethos for the OU however is to be device-agnostic where possible due to the variety of technologies, user base and demographics that apply to our users - maintaining our Open mission. Hence, a large proportion of work is in web optimisation and generating a cross-platform infrastructure rather than custom builds for specific technologies. So, while the initial releases of some materials may be on a subset of these - the intention is for these to always have alternates. *
Earlier work by the OU involved a large number of research and evaluation projects - some international in scope, some cross-sector with schools and some institutional partnerships. This early work was largely led by the Institute of Educational Technology at the OU. In addition, a number of research groups across the university have had an interest in mobile learning for some time, and some activities were coordinated further in the work by a number of our CETLs.
The Learning, Teaching and Quality portfolio have a number of connected projects that are loosely coupled in a strategic action plan - which covers institution-wide services, public engagement, information literacy, course resources and educational & professional development (EPD):
- Mobile Learning Systems - through the Mobile VLE [mobile-optimised Moodle]
- Library Services - building on prior mobile templates
- Learning objects and subject-specific interactives - app creation and HTML5
- Mobile-friendly resources - eBooks & alternative formats and (podcast) multimedia
- Professional development - EPD materials, Digilab facilities
Specific larger-scale unifying projects underway include:
- Roadmap Acceleration Programme - Mobile VLE v.2
- Building Mobile Learning Capacity - apps, eBooks and interactives
- Staff development - through guidance and coordination (incl. this site)
As part of this strategic approach, regular monitoring takes place on the mobile usage of key student-facing services such as StudentHome and the VLE, which are usually updated monthly. The intention in future is to be able to add these to course data and demographics to assist in planning and learning design longer-term.
Parallel work is also underway to improve the OU headers and footers for mobile - providing a common method for device detection to be used by other sites. Easier sign-in to OU authenticated pages will follow, and the intention is to provide a more mobile-friendly experience from the top-down.
As part of our external engagement, the OU is also an education provider/institutional member of the International Association for Mobile Learning. Prof. Agnes Kukulska-Hulme of IET is the IAmLearn President. A number of OU staff are involved with the association and some of our project information is available there, as well as through the series of mLearn series of conferences. Further outputs are available from the Open Research Online repository, linked from the Community page of this site.
* as examples - OU on iTunes U and OUView on YouTube are driven by our podcast.open engine; the iBooks enhanced ePub eBooks are designed from Structured Content to have alternative formats including synthetic voice MP3 and DAISY; initial iOS apps are being explored for use on Android and as shell apps to common back-end web apps, incorporating HTML5 and open data.