We are in the process of thinking about using BB Mobile and I wanted to start a discussion on what technical difficulties anyone had setting it up in regards to course room functionality. Also, about student participation and if that has increased.
Thanks for any comments or feedback about your experience launching Mobile.
Alice Abeyta
Instructional Technologist
Alice,
I'm afraid I don't know quite what you mean by "course room functionality". We haven't really measured "student participation" with the Mobile app. The Mobile building block provides some rough statistics on the number of users who have logged in with the Mobile app, but does not break them down by role, only by platform, so we can't count students vs. faculty using the Mobile app, nor can we get a list of specific users who have used it.
The only technical difficulties we had is in setting up the test server for Mobile. If you are using SSL on your Blackboard server, the Mobile app really wants an SSL certificate from a recognized provider--self-signed certs don't really work last time I checked. Otherwise, the setup was pretty straightforward.
Mike
Hi
At the moment, we are testing out Bb Mobile Learn and one small issue is with some internal urls in resource areas. On a computer the links are fine, but using the app it treats it like any website and seems to leave the app
We now have to decide how useful it is to link between support course areas, and whether we remove these links or not
Regards
Ty
Hi Ty,
That makes sense. When looking at the course from a computer using a regular web browser, the communication is mostly done via HTTP and a URL to an local resource within Blackboard is just like any of the other URLs and links in the system, to be opened with the same browser (or appropriate browser plug-in).
For the Mobile app, there's a distinction between links generated by Blackboard--which are not using HTTP within the app--and URLs pointing to web addresses via HTTP, even if they are located within Blackboard. The app has to call a browser to open HTTP connections.
At least, that's my understanding. I'm not sure if there's any clear way to specify connections between courses in a way that's recognized by the app.
Hi Mike
Thank you for your feedback, i was presuming, but wanted to check i wasn't doing something wrong.
Much appreciated
We are experiencing the same when testing. It seems if we have a link within the course to a document in the content collection it does not want to pull it up - have you run into any of these issues?
What type of documents are you linking to in the Content Collection, and how are you linking to them in the course?
I don't believe so, it doesn't work from announcements, but i think it is okay otherwise.
non Mobile wise my document url keep changing and causing me issues (duplicating the xid- part)