September 04, 2006
Course Related Mobile Sites
This is a really lazy post describing a demo (and obsolete!) mobile WAP site for students currently studying an OU course, cut and pasted from here but while it's 5 years or so old as far as I'm concerned, it may be of interest to people who are starting to look at mobile sites again.
When I built the site, it provided an interesting exercise in identifying what sort of content could be sensibly and OUsefully delivered via a small screen, in this case using WAP pages (though I did also get half-way through building an SMS equivalent, which really concetrated the mind in terms of character count!)
A year or so later, I put together another website, this time targetted at potential rather than current (on a course) students: Technology Short Course Program (TSCP) Experimental WAP Service.
It was brought to mind by Zinadoo, a basic and easy-to-use mobile web page builder, which made me think that I haven't tried building a mobile site for ages...
After a temporary welcome screen, users are presented with the WAP service home-page: |  |
 | The T396 Overview provides information for students interested in taking T396. This information mirrors that provided on the Courses and Qualifications website for T396. In particular, it includes administrative information (course level, the number of credit points, etc.) as well as a short summary of the course. |
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A wide variety of information is provided for currently enrolled students. This includes alerts regarding Stop Press information that has been made available, information regarding the status of course related mailings and the dates of TMA of deadlines. |  |
 |  |
 | An additional page identifies the current, previous and next topic of study, with reference to the Study Calendar for the course. |
I think an SMS strategy is currently being looked at in the OU by student services, and mobile Moodle of some sort is also on the cards, I think, but I've not heard - or seen - anything definite as yet...
If any OU readers know about OUr mobile strategy, I'd be keen to hear about it... :-)
Posted by ajh59 at September 4, 2006 06:54 PM