Sakai - The Mobile Experience (Apereo Teaching and Learning Meeting)

The Vula and Universe App has been providing South African students the opportunity to access their Sakai course content on the go - this presentation provides a quick history and a peek into what's next for Sakai on mobile.

Presented at the Apereo Teaching and Learning Meeting: 1 November 2017.

Transcript

1. Sakai - The Mobile Experience Alastair Hendricks
 @ali_hen
2. About Me • Attended the University of Cape Town from 2012 to mid-2015 • Mobile Engineer - specialising in iOS • Currently at Superbalist.com, a fashion e-commerce company in South Africa.
3. Building a mobile Sakai experience. • Started building an iOS app for Vula (UCT’s Sakai instance) in mid-2013, just after Tighe launched his Android app in April 2013. • Launched in Sept 2013. • Basic functionality, mainly used scraped/stripped mobile frames. • User reception was good, the main advantage was the login experience (tedious on mobile, session expiry)
4. Building a mobile Sakai experience.
 Version 1
5. Building a mobile Sakai experience. • Decided to pursue building a Sakai mobile experience full- time in 2015 • /direct is ❤. • Needed to be generic enough to be deployed/integrated at universities running Sakai 10. • Named ‘Universe’. • New app - this posed some growth problems at UCT.
6. Building a mobile Sakai experience. • Tried to be mostly native and leverage /direct as much as possible. • Fallback onto stripped web when needed. • Posed it’s own problems (/direct & /portal sessions aren’t shared) • Engaged with universities where possible before rolling out. • Testing was also a black box without university involvement. • Working on development full-time cost, getting universities on board to pay was difficult/impossible. Ads were also a touchy subject.
7. Building a mobile Sakai experience. • Unofficially rolled out to the following universities:
 - University of Cape Town
 - University of North West (South Africa)
 - University of the Witwatersrand
 - University of South Africa
 - University of the Western Cape • Released iOS and Android.
8. Building a mobile Sakai experience.
 Version 2
9. Building a mobile Sakai experience. • Moved away from developing Universe full-time at the beginning of 2016 and looked to gain experience on other projects. • A fair number of students at schools and universities still use Universe. • The Vula iOS app by Tighe provided a good alternative for users that wanted a different mobile learning experience.
10. Building a mobile Sakai experience.
 Where to now? • Sakai iOS Framework compatible with v11, wrapper around all the logic of communicating with a Sakai instance. • Written in Swift 4. • Hoping to provide UI elements too, in order to provide simple integration into existing apps + thoughtful user experience for students. • Integration tested.
11. Building a mobile Sakai experience.
 Where to now? • Universe v2 (un-named) is currently in active development. • Uses the Sakai framework built over the past year. • Back to basics - used the millions of analytics events and user journeys to simplify the app. • Ingress API for schools/universities to deliver push notifications for site announcements. • Alpha testing starting in December, if you’re interested in your e-learning department taking part, please email me. • Plan to launch at first tested universities in Feb 2018. The app is opt-in from an institution POV, in order to maintain a high standard of integration.
12. Building a mobile Sakai experience.
 Version 3
13. Building a mobile Sakai experience.
 Where to now? • Got ideas to provide a better experience on mobile? • Keen to get back into the loop with what future plans there are for a modern Sakai API (+ docs) & hear ideas on how to better leverage existing API projects. • The staff experience still needs to be worked on (staff should have a great mobile experience too)
14. Thank You Alastair Hendricks
 @ali_hen