Moodle Mobile Now Developing an Android Native Client

Well, I guess it’s mLearning Week here at e-Literate. Just a day after I noted that the main difference we are aware of between the Moodle mobile clients and the forthcoming Blackboard Mobile Learn client is that Blackboard plans to have native apps for Android and Blackberry, the Moodle folks announce progress on a native Android app. Let the arms race begin!

Update: I have just been informed by a member of the Moodle mobile development team that both the iPhone app and the Android app are, in fact, web apps and not platform-native apps. That wasn’t obvious to me at all on casual viewing (especially with the iPhone, where I have no first-hand experience and didn’t recognize the browser chrome). It will be interesting to see how much of a difference that makes in terms of user experience, particularly with Google and Apple both pushing HTML 5.  Anyway, the mobile web app has been tested for Android, but is not Android-native.

By the way, the helpful people at Blackboard’s P.R. firm referred me to this study at Ball State University showing that, as of about six months ago, 38.5% of their students own smart phones, and 18% (or roughly half of the students with smart phones) owned iPhones. No word on the Blackberry/Android breakdown, which probably has changed in the past six months anyway due to the new Android phones on the market. I am quite sure that there is a lot of variability from school to school, based on demographic, socio-economic, and geographic factors.

There’s actually some interesting mobile work being done by University of Cape Town in South Africa, but it focuses on text messages rather than whizzy smart phone apps. (I strongly suspect that UCT has a lower percentage of smart phone users with unlimited data plans than Ball State does.) I’m looking into the possibility of getting a guest post on this topic at some point. (That’s a hint, Stephen.)

Michael Feldstein is the founder of e-Literate who currently works as the Senior Program Manager for MindTap at Cengage Learning. For more information, see his profile page.

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