Mobile MoodleA mobile extension to the

VLE

Supriya Krishnan, Narain Ramluchmun, Chara Balasubramaniam, Terry Poulton

St George’s, University of London

Background

• Mobile learning and the changes in mobile technology

• Media players, game devices, wireless single purpose devices in learning

• Factors to be considered for mobile learning in HE and FE institutions

Aims

1.Explore how students at SGUL use mobiles for learning

2. Integrate mobile learning to existing VLE at St George’s

3. Decide whether to focus on m-learning

St George’s Mobile Project

• An online survey was created in SurveyMonkey

• Completed by students of MBBS, Paramedics, Physiotherapy, Biomed etc

• Survey was divided into 5 sections: 1. Introduction 2. Personal Information 3. Phone Characteristics 4. Phone Use 5. Phone Use in Learning

The Mobile Learning Survey

• 714 medical and healthcare students across all the different years completed the survey

• 424 were females 290 were males, with an average age of 21

Survey Summary

What is your gender?

MaleFemale

• 25.5% owned a Nokia mobile phone

• Apple took fourth place !!

“Please use the dropdown list below to select your mobile phone brand”

“Choose 5 most important purposes of your mobile phone”

43.1%

40.2%

34%

• Almost 50% of the students have accessed at least one m-Learning application/website last month• 48% have planned on using their mobiles to watch educational videos

How many m-Learning applications/websites did you access last month?

Survey Analysis• Around 200 favourable written comments were received, a couple of these were :

“ I find recorded lectures/podcasts extremely useful, and making them mobile even more so. I already access medical lectures, anatomy videos etc via my phone.”

“I think m-Learning is a good idea, I don't really know that much about it but podcasts and quizzes etc would be really useful for those times when you're waiting/ have nothing to do but would like to do a bit of quick revision. At the moment I carry quiz books etc around which are quite bulky.”

• Overall, it was found that most of the students supported ‘m-Learning at St George’s

The requirements: An open source project Technically customisable Easy to implement Simple to use and manage

MM satisfied all the requirements and has been implemented according to the guidelines

Mobile Moodle (MM)- Identified & Implemented

• Access Link

• Categorisation based on Moodle

• Personalised Login

• Back navigation

• Removed unwanted links and categories

MM Browser Customisation

Moodle Quiz on desktop

How is Moodle content transferred to mobile phones?

Moodle Quiz on MM

The Usability Testing

•Test was carried out with 20 users (staff and students)

•Completed some typical tasks in MM

•An expert user was created

•The average of time taken to complete the tasks by first time users was then compared to that of expert user

MM Evaluation

Test Results

• Device cost

• Accessibility

• Storage

• Data Security

Challenges

Mobile Learning at St George’s – What's next?

Thank You!