Moodle App Experience Revealed by Mobile Learning Pilots
Horaplantsoen (NL), February 2013 - Initiated by Samsung Thailand, the Dutch-based company Smart Learning Apps and the Malaysia-based cloud company Anise Asia present the first Moodle Native App for Android tablets. Development started with several pilots at universities, using the Moodle platform on tablets. The Moodle Educloud Native App turns any Android tablet into a fully equipped learning device, offering flow-based HD video courses; social-media support like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn; and current cloud-based file-storage technology. The iPad Moodle version will follow soon.
Moodle performs badly on current tablet devices
Today, thousands of universities and millions of students are struggling, using the world's most popular LMS, Moodle, on their new-generation tablet learning devices, like iPads and Android tablets. Because of the limitations current standard tablet browsers offer, it is quite impossible to deliver complete Moodle courses on the devices. Key features like downloading files, editing files, and uploading assignment files to teachers and lecturers are poorly supported by current tablets browsers.
Even when using the new HTML 5 browser technology, Moodle courses perform slowly and don't bring the native user experience students expect from their beautiful tablet device. As learning experts say, -œOffering browse- based mobile learning is like saying you can get air conditioning in your car if you roll down the windows.-
New Moodle native experience on tablets
The Moodle Educloud Native App turns any Android tablet, into a fully equipped learning device, offering flow-based HD video courses; social-media support like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn; and current cloud technology. File exchange between students and lecturers is managed from the powerful cloud. The pilots further revealed that students need collaboration features like course-based chat, forums, video communication, Skype support, push notifications, and all the beautiful hardware features today's tablets offer.
Current Moodle users
Moodle's worldwide numbers and enterprise-level usage place it as the open-source alternative to Blackboard and other proprietary systems in terms of maturity and scale. As of October 2012, it had a user base of 70,793 registered and verified sites, serving 63,204,814 users in 6.7+ million courses with 1.2+ million trainers, teachers, and lecturers.
Forecast Android Tablets 2013
Based on analysis of the major platform companies and the white-box market, Digitimes Research forecasts that global tablet shipments (including both branded and white-box models) will overtake notebook shipments in 2013, growing by 38.3% on 2012 levels to hit 210 million units. Digitimes Research also projects that global shipments of branded and white-box tablets will top 300 million by 2015, with branded devices accounting for more than 200 million units and white-box tablets for around 100 million.
