Open edX Mobile Product Vision / Direction
- Marco Morales
To support ongoing efforts for this find us in Slack at #wg-product-mobile, or read more in Confluence here: Subgroup: Mobile
Open edX Mobile Direction: Roadmap & Themes
Our roadmap is maintained in Github, and we will share our Open edX 2024 Conference mobile talk here soon.
1 - Global Access to Lightning Fast Full Courses
Our primary focus is to enable high-quality learning in lower bandwidth and limited online access environments, expanding the platform’s reach to support learners globally with lightning-fast full courses in your pocket.
Initiatives: Smart Offline Downloads, Full Offline Course Support, Sequence Navigation Update, App Level Download Tools
2 - Toward a Personal Learning Coach
The mobile learning experience should emulate a supportive coach and mentor who knows your learning goals and targets, helping you balance and schedule learning to hit your goals across many learning opportunities.
Initiatives: App Level Dates, Mobile Notification / Inbox, Conversation Style Messages, Visual Course Progress, Course Goal Content Personalization, Improved Content Goal Views
3 - Learning in the Moment
Meeting learners where they are is a key goal for our future, including an expanded sense of which screens you can use to learn, helping match you with courses that fit your interests, helping you learn with others, and motivating continued learning.
Initiatives: Improved Mobile Discovery, Discovery Stream / Feed Mode, Tablet / Landscape Improvements,
Expanded Screen Support (Widgets, Watches, Cars, TVs), Activity View (Augmented Profile, Streaks, Milestones), Learn with Others v1
4 - Ecosystem Adoption and Mobile Usage
We aim to catalyze a dramatic increase in mobile application adoption across our community of providers, instances, and learners to support modern learning on the go.
Initiatives: Learning Site Selection, API Architecture Review, Feature Flag Documentation, Improved Plugin Architecture, Commerce Integration Options
5 - Open Community Processes
Continued investment in open processes and contribution models across product, design, and technology teams contributing to the mobile experiences on Open edX.
Connect with @Marco Morales and follow #wg-product-mobile to learn more!
Themes | Concept Sketches |
|---|---|
Access - Performance - Full Courses We expect the Open edX mobile experience to focus on enabling high-quality learning in lower bandwidth and limited online access environments, expanding the platform’s reach to support learners across the globe with lightning-fast full courses in your pocket.
| \We plan to add a few concept sketch / mockups to visually represent this future, including capabilities like full course downloads for offline viewing and improved offline catalog browse and search tools.
|
Holistic - Supportive - Goal-Driven - Coach We expect the Open edX mobile experience to respond to a learner’s goals and learning objects more thoughtfully. Today the experience is built around content lists and depends on student self-direction and intrinsic motivation. The mobile learning experience should emulate a supportive coach and mentor who knows your learning goals and targets, helping you balance and schedule learning to hit your goals across many learning opportunities. | Concept Sketches Below (More Coming Soon)  Visual reference for a course home experience focused on supporting next steps toward a student selected goal that the course experience is oriented around. Supportive updates from the system and instructors form the basis of a conversational home page to elevate motivating messages and a sense of instructor presence in the learning environment. |
Current Open edX Mobile Experience
We are in the process of switching from our existing mobile applications to newly architected and rebuilt code repositories, open-sourced and maintained by Raccoon Gang.
We are focused on updating these new applications to make them more broadly used by the Open edX ecosystem. Today the cost for Open edX instance owners of maintaining and deploying custom mobile applications is high, but we hope to change that with initiatives focused:
on improving mobile build automation and testing - Project - Mobile Build System / Tutor Plugin (FC-27)
enabling a single mobile app build to serve many learning sites - Project - Learning Site Selection (FC-25a)
We are also looking at adding some features and capabilities in the legacy mobile applications that are not yet built into the new open edx mobile applications, and these efforts are listed in the Mobile Roadmap - Open edX Mobile Roadmap