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0038 SP: Collaborative Tchnology
Implementing and trialling an award-winning
mobile phone interface to the Sakai VLE
Authors
Adam Marshall
Fawei Geng
Jill Fresen
Theme
Broad tents and strange
bedfellows
Tags
authentication, classroomVoting,
collaboration, handheldDevices,
mobileLearning, openSource,
Sakai, sharedServices, VLE
In recent years, mobile devices have begun to be used more and more to
access learning resources and this trend is set to continue (Educause, 2009);
evidence suggests that mobile devices maximise productive learning time
(Motiwalla, 2007) and facilitate access to institutional services including
VLEs (Educause, 2009).
The University of Oxford uses the open source Sakai as its institutional VLE.
JISC funding was secured in 2009 and an award-winning (UCISA, 2011)
mobile portal (“Mobile Oxford”) was developed incorporating an interface
to certain tools within Sakai. The intention was not to provide a mini
version of Sakai but instead to offer something familiar to users of various
phone applications (“apps”) and concentrate on the tasks that work well
on a phone. The tools targeted to be enabled via the mobile platform are:
Polls, Tutorial Sign-up, Resources (documents, images etc.), Surveys and
Announcements.
The approach adopted was to develop a mobile platform which relays
requests from a browser running on a smart phone to the VLE. When
queried, the VLE sends information back to the mobile platform, which then
constructs a web page and forwards it to the user’s phone in an optimal
format.
One of the biggest challenges was authentication: users should not have
to authenticate every time they wish to access Sakai – we opted for oAuth
which is a system used by Flickr amongst others. The idea is that after a
single ‘normal’ login, a user’s phone will be able to access the VLE for a
year without further authentication; we manage the security implications by
granting reduced access to tools in the VLE.
During the academic year 2010/11, we ran a pilot project which attracted 101
staff users to the support site in the VLE. Lunch-time sessions were held to
demonstrate the interface and outline the pedagogical possibilities of mobile
access. We will report on a case study in Medical Sciences in which students
worked collaboratively and used their phones synchronously to respond to a
set of revision questions presented using the Polls tool.
References
Educause. 2009. The ECAR study of undergraduate students and information technology (ID:
ERS0906).
Motiwalla, L.F. 2007. Mobile learning: A framework and evaluation. Computers & Education 49(3):
581–596.
UCISA. 2011. University of Oxford wins the Award for Excellence. www.ucisa.ac.uk/en/news/2011-02-
01-afe-winner.aspx.
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