Students in lower income areas attend schools that are often unable to afford the cost, time and risk to implement new technology. Our proposal offers a way to reach these students with cutting edge mobile educational technology and confirm its usefulness.
The leading Open Source learning management system (LMS) is Moodle (1.2m registered teachers and 35m students in 209 countries). Blackboard is another popular system but it’s not free which means it does not fit in tight budgets or that approvals take too long. The history of Moodle adoption has many stories of small groups of teachers banding together to just give it a try. Often, this has led to school-wide or district-wide adoption.
The main features of LMS’s are around delivery of instruction and tracking. At the simple end of the scale, just having reminders of current home work due would be a big benefit to many students, and their parents.
Moodle has a number of mobile clients available for smart phones and Java clients. We propose to develop a BREW MP client to make the capability available to a greater number of students on the very handsets more of them have. BREW MP is available on a large number of handsets sold by Verizon, Sprint and AT&T. Moodle Mobile FAQ.
What we have:
- Potential testing grounds through connections in school districts
- Some BREW and mobile development experience
What we need:
- BREW MP developer
- Someone with experience with Moodle API’s
- Teachers to be in beta test
