 Hello everyone, I'm Davina and this is Sharon. We're product development managers at the Open University and we're here today to talk to you a bit about the research that we've done before we started developing Moodle Mobile at the OE. So this is really the why we're doing the app but if you're interested in how we did the app Mark and Sam both did presentations this morning so you can take a look at their presentation slides. So just as a bit of background the Open University is the largest university in the UK. We have around 170,000 registered users or students and we have a really active VLE so we have over 180,000 registered users and around two million transactions every day. So it's pretty big and just as a base for that but our teaching model is very much at a distance so students learn independently and then they use the VLE to do activities and such. So the first question we really asked before actually investing any time or money into the app is do we need one? And the reason we ask that is because we actually already have a really good digital learning experience for our students. So this is an example of a module website or a course website that we currently use with students. This is actually the one I'm studying now and what happens is that the students will come to this as their main place to go and they'll go through week by week to see what reading materials they need to study, collaborative activities they need to do and any online tutorials they have to attend. I may just work way through that and that's available both through the website and it's also fully mobile responsive as well. So we give them a range of digital experiences here. So like I said we have the website, it's mobile responsive, if you've got an internet connection it works well across all devices but we also provide downloads for them where they can get alternative formats so they can get the learning materials in words, PDFs, ebooks, things like that. And on the odd occasion we supplement these with books as well. Oh just to mention we do currently already have the OU Anywhere app, the manager of which is down there. So that currently manages the downloads but we will be replacing that with mobile. So if all I did anything I did some desk research just to see what people's habits were with mobile devices generally and unsurprisingly you can probably tell over the last 10 years people kind of use their phones a lot. That's not surprising however what was interesting is when you actually look at what they're doing on their phones use of the internet or a browser on their mobile device sort of has doubled since 2011 so people generally use the internet on their phone for about an hour every day but with apps it's actually gone up to about three hours a day which is kind of a lot. So for us if we're going to be trying to encourage students to study on the go, engage with their materials more sort of stay connected with the university we probably want to be investing in that space in the app space. For the pure reason that it's easier for us to tap into behaviours they've already formed rather than trying to get them to build new habits. So again from my desk research, oh that's a little red bit. So from my desk research just a really brief summary of what people like and don't like about apps. What they seem to like about apps is that they're designed for your mobile devices they're really quick to access. You don't have to worry about your internet connection. What they don't seem to like is that it takes up loads of storage on your phone and you don't always have all the information you want because it's often a reduced version of a website. Storage one was really interesting and some of the user testing we did the younger students in particular with the smaller phones were really obsessive about it so it's something to bear in mind. Okay so I'm going to talk through now some of the research that we did before we invested and just to give you an idea of why we do that. We use a user-centred design process. You've probably seen a version of this from one of us before but we basically go through discover design, develop and release. So the upfront research was in the discover phase and then later on I'll give you a few insights from the user testing we did in the develop phase as well. Okay so the research we did up from well the first thing I did was go through all the feedback we'd had from students through our module website so we have a feedback mechanism on our module websites and all the reviews that people had left us from our current apps in the app stores as well. So this lives literally thousands of reports from students telling us what they liked what they didn't like and what they'd like to change so that was my first protocol in terms of the actual research of an industrial research. We then conducted some focus groups to help inform some evidence-based personas which are a key part of the user design process that we run. This wasn't specifically about the app but we had lots of really natural conversation with students who were saying oh it's really frustrating when I do this wouldn't an app be great for that so we actually collated a lot more data from that when we expected. We then worked with an external UX research company to conduct 10 in-depth user interviews with students who took us through their entire sort of student journey and they were able to articulate to us exactly where and why they would want to be using an app so that was fantastic for us so we got some really good insight from that. And so once we'd done all of that we sort of analysed it looked at the kind of key things that were coming out and we started to run workshops with students our student association reps and our tutors and we got them to prioritise the requirements for us and then also start actually sketching up what they would want the app to look like. The reason we did that is because it actually was fantastic for us to get a visual representation of their expectations which was actually more useful than the poster side of things. So from all that I think what we were able to drive is that the key issues that students were kind of explaining to us that we think an app might be useful when solving are that essentially they're really busy especially for open university students they often work full-time and they study part-time alongside it and so for them they've sometimes really struggled to get their study in so what they wanted was a mechanism to be able to use little bits of time for other day to whether it was just to plan do some admin maybe do some activity on the forums things like that just so that when they actually go and sit down and study they can focus on that rather than having to do all the other stuff. And then they also talk about wanting an alternative way of studying other than a computer so again a lot of them work full-time at desks they don't want to come home and work on a laptop so for them having an app is almost like the experience you'd get with a book. And they often talked about wanting a streamlined version of the website our website is very comprehensive so there can be a lot of information on a small screen so the app just delivers it in a much cleaner way which would be useful for them. And then something which we weren't expecting is that students often talked about feeling like they weren't on top of when things were meant to happen so what we're hoping will happen when we have the app is that because they have consistent offline access to their study plan and with all their key dates it'll be easier for them to actually plan time around their social lives the work life and things like that because at the moment they have to log on to the website to see that so that kind of disconnect wasn't working for them. But ultimately what they wanted from an Apple what we're hoping the Apple resolve is this feeling of isolation again because we're completely distanced our students often don't see each of us so they want this consistent tether with the university with the tutors and other students so what do they want? So from all of that these are the high priorities that our students were telling us that they wanted unsurprisingly access to their learning stuff which was a good sign so they basically wanted to be able to read stuff on the go watch videos do quizzes connect with do that activities things like that so that was kind of expected but a new one for us was actually because it was now being delivered through a mobile device they wanted to be able to listen to the content so they wanted the words to be spoken to them so whether it's in their car or whether they're commuting or something like that they wanted to be able to do that that doesn't exist in the app at the moment but it's something we'll probably look at in the future Students were also very clear that they wanted notifications so they wanted to be told things like reminders for tutorials that were coming up deadlines for assessments things like that but they're also very clear that they wanted to complete control over that so they really wanted to be able to turn them off more than anything and we had some great stories coming from some of our students as well about how they wanted quick access to their assessment grades so at the moment they have to log on to the internet to find out what the grades are when the marks have come in but they wanted quicker access to that so that was good some of the other stuff that they've been talking about which the students had much more polarized views on so we need to do more research to really understand what the requirements are but here are some of those the key one for us really is accessibility we have a really high percentage of a disabled students at VOU and obviously we've been new regulations and everything coming in that's a big one for us in user testing we found that the biggest drawbacks of the app so far were not being able to change font size particularly on apple devices and not being able to change font colors and things so again that's something we'll have to look at in the future but generally our expert accessibility has been really good for the app okay so I mentioned earlier that we did focus groups for the personas um well this is Luca he's one of the eight personas that we developed from that um and basically what we use him as the key primary persona for the app because he works full-time in a desk job and at the weekend he kind of works as a bus replacement driver so we use him because what we actually expect to happen is we don't expect the kind of core study patterns of our students to change because of the app so here you'll see that basically during the week he studies at his desk either before after work but at the weekends he'll actually print off all his stuff and take them with him because he doesn't have an internet connection what we're hoping will happen when students have the app is that they have more consistent connection with the university in between so he'll get a deadline reminder he'll get some forum notifications you know when he's got 20 minutes waiting for a bus at the weekend you know he won't have to go print everything off he can just read stuff that he's downloaded so it won't change his study necessarily it'll just complements it and it will be a much needed addition to help fit into his busy life so from all the research we did and from the user testing that we've done on the unbranded beta version that we've been working on so far we've decided to focus on free things for our first launch so we're just going to focus on the study planner getting all our learning content working really well in the app and downloads our user testing found that download management was something which users weren't quite comfortable with in the current app however the developers have been working really closely with Moodle to make some changes to that basically students want Netflix download management and that's what they expect so if it's any more complicated than that they don't know how to do it so that's what we were finding again much like the priorities I showed earlier the things that we're going to be working on next are probably going to involve these but a lot of that's going to be based on the user feedback that we have for more user testing okay so that's the summary for me so I'm actually going to hand over to Sharon now who's going to talk us through the beta version of the app and then let you know where we're going next with it thanks okay so we've been developing the app for a little while now and this is where we are with our current beta version so it is using the standard Moodle app at the moment this is being used for all our development and testing the standard menus and app navigation are in place and all our courses are available via the course dashboard within each of our courses it opens up on the study planner page students can pick which week they want to view and for all the content in the planner they've got the options to market as complete or download it for offline use our developers have been working really closely with Moodle HQ on more granular control of downloads within courses at the top of the page it's our course navigation that lets students transfer between the key areas such as assessment tutorials and news our online content is delivered through an in-house publishing system and our own plugin with its own navigation it has a range of media audio and visual standard content and interactives accessible content is key for us with figure descriptions for images and transcripts for videos being built in work on our standard content is complete but we're currently working on more in complex interactions in HTML5 the assessment and tutorial pages follow the standard theme and format of our mobile responsive websites the content is viewable within the app as is the students personal data so their assignment scores and tutorial dates and times for tutorials adobe connect is going to be handled outside of the mobile app for our first release collaborative tools aren't going to be included users will be handed off from the app to the mobile web version we started developing the forum ng plugin as you can see but we quickly discovered that it was going to be an unfamiliar experience so we've taken the decision to review our desktop mobile web and app interface in order to redesign a simpler interface that will be the same in all spaces we've come quite far we think we've still got quite a lot to do so we're still working with the Moodle core app for our development and user testing that's with our own students and staff external researchers and participants and our own teams field testing we'll have our branded app in June so basically more blue and less orange for the next round of testing and we're aiming to soft launch to about 20 courses this September the June milestone is actually where we start drafting our communications guidance formalising our support plans and building another stream into our feedback process physically turning on the app is quite simple the trouble is our main teaching and learning servers host a range of websites in a range of themes so we've implemented quite a simple admin interface that allows us to only display listed courses in the app this has been absolutely vital for our live field testing on our live servers and will be critical to our soft launch in September thank you very much thank you so much to you Sharon we have time for a couple questions are there any questions uh not really a question uh that's fantastic to see how you're taking that and running with it um you mentioned one of the things that students were wanting was the uh planning side of things and i've been thinking for a while lately that's a big hold that we have there's something great to work on together is um there are study apps out there where you plug in oh i have this assignment and this assignment due in this many weeks and it helps you plan your time leading up to that your study time which when you think about it is a really obvious thing we should be doing uh helping them organise that so um if you're interested in that or if that's something your students are asking for maybe we can work on that together yeah i mean we we we did look at the timeline functionality and the calendar we're not things we currently use very much so um it's yeah but it's yeah it's the next part so yeah definitely it'd be great to look at that thanks thank you so no one hello hi thank you for the presentation uh couple of things uh i know it's just a very old problem for research uh first what's the percentage of students taken i could say into using the mobile app as a percentage of all the students you have and uh like uh dr ellenberger mathematician says what was the way to provide information about the really lazy users that they didn't use it why and what was the reason okay um so we haven't released the app yet so we're doing the early adopts of release in september um so um up to this point we've done the research and the user testing but we don't have live modules on it yet um the only percentages or numbers i can give you is that our current app currently has around 20 000 users um but we expect the uptake on this one to be quite a lot more i imagine um but at the moment we don't know uh but we'll be doing a steady rollout over between sort of september 2019 and september 2020 so maybe we'll be able to talk about that in busload or next year's middle moot thanks thank you very much thanks