- Mobile app notifications
- Creating LMS Mobile friendly courses
As more and more students access courses from their smartphones, tablets or other mobile devices, it is increasingly important to ensure your courses are mobile-friendly.
Encouraging students to install the official LMS mobile app is one way to improve their learning experience. Below are some suggestions for optimizing your course materials for students both using the app and accessing LMS from mobile devices.
Contents
2 Provide a ‘how to’ guide to LMS on the mobile
4.1 Media download for offline usage
Notifications and messages
Encourage your students to enable mobile notifications so they are alerted about calendar events, forum posts, messages, assignment submissions and so on. Find out more in Mobile app notifications.
You can also enable mobile notifications for all the users by default via the Messaging settings default message outputs. Students can disable Mobile notifications within the app.
Provide a ‘how to’ guide to LMS on the mobile
Consider offering your students a guide (as a PDF or a page resource) on how to access your course on the app, what they can do and not (yet) do from the app. Read up on the what’s New for mobile.
Setting up your course
- Topics or weekly course format is best suited to mobile devices.
- Don’t use orphaned activities or direct links to activities (the links will work but is not the best experience for mobile).
- Site or course blocks are not displayed in the Mobile app, avoid putting important information in blocks.
Course content
- Use responsive HTML in pages or mini-sites.
- Try to use a page resource instead of downloadable documents where possible.
- Avoid uploading many documents or having numerous, text-heavy pages. Think more in terms of short “information-bytes”.
- If you include YouTube videos, provide them also for download and offline viewing in a folder. Not all video formats are supported so add them in different formats. (MP4 is probably the most widely accepted format.)
- Drag and drop questions behave differently in the app. You can’t drag images, you need to tap to select and tap to drop.
- Note that if you add YouTube video links or map links as URL resources, they will open automatically in the app.
- Use only plugins which provide support so they can be accessed via the mobile app.
- If you want to include large audio files in your course, please consider to include them embedded in a label or HTML page content instead as a file. The reason is that embedded files will play even if the screen is locked but files won’t play with the screen locked.
Media download for offline usage
To enable media files, such as video, to be downloaded
- The file must be uploaded to the course, rather than being linked to (from YouTube, Vimeo etc)
- The file must be small – less than 2MB for 3G users or less than 20MB for WiFi users
When a page containing the video is viewed (without playing the video), the file will then be downloaded.
Offline activities
All the supported activities work offline, although some require specific settings like the quiz module.
Things to avoid
Some activities are not yet fully supported by the mobile app, so find alternatives.
Mobile device considerations
The app works better on devices running
- Android 4.4 onwards
- iOs 6 onwards
In old devices, you may find problems related to:
- User interface
- Connection problems (specifically when connecting to sites using https certificates)
- Slowness
The first version of the app was supported in Windows Phone and Windows 7. This version is not supported anymore and it was withdrawn from the Windows Store. Its usage is not advised.
Links to open the LMS Mobile app
If required, links which open the LMS Mobile app may be provided in the course (for users browsing the site using a mobile device with the app installed).
Links are of the form
lmsmobile://link=https://yourlmssite.org/mod/...
For example, the link
lmsmobile://link=https://mysite.es/mod/choice/view.php?id=8
will open the mobile app and display a choice activity.