Title:	MOODLBILE: EXTENDING MOODLE TO THE MOBILE ON/OFFLINE SCENARIO
Author(s):	Marc Alier Forment , Mª José Casany Guerrero
ISBN:	978-972-8924-54-6
Editors:	Inmaculada Arnedillo Sánchez and Pedro Isaías
Year:	2008
Edition:	Single
Keywords:	Mobile Learning, Moodle, LMS, OKI, Interoperability
Type:	Full Paper
First Page:	11
Last Page:	18
Language:	English
Cover:
Full Contents:	click to dowload
Paper Abstract:	The evolution of the web based education platforms goes towards a mix web/mobile scenario. Teachers and students will continue to access the LMS platforms using the web for major tasks, but more and more often the access to the learning platform will shift to mobile devices in an ubiquitous scenario. This will lead to a whole new kind of learning applications that will take advantage of the unique conditions of mobility and location of the mobile devices. However this applications need to be integrated in the current generation of Learning Management Systems (LMS). This paper presents the development of a mobile extension for the most popular Free (Libre) Open Source Software (FLOSS) LMS : Moodle. The main goal of the project is to extend to mobile devices the most commonly used activities of a Moodle course: forum, calendar, wiki, glossary and internal mail, in a way that the mobile user may work online as well as offline. The simplest approach would have been to create a special Moodle theme and CSS that makes accessible the Moodle web based interface from the mobile devices little screens. But since the wireless connections are not cheap (plain access unavailable) and there is not access coverage in every place, soon the need for a software client in the mobile device, that stores information locally and syncs with the server when the connection is available and authorized by the user, became clear. To sync the mobile client with the server, we have developed a webservice interoperability layer, inspired by the Open Knowledge Initiative’s (OKI) Open Service Interface Definition’s (OSID’s ) standards.
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