Recommendations for mobile virtual campus design based on student feedback

Abstract

In this paper we present a series of recommendations designed to guide universities in the development of mobile learning environments, based on a case study of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia, UOC), an online university. A focus group was organized to gather students’ views on the three mobile developments for the UOC’s Virtual Campus: a hybrid app, an adapted version for mobile browsers, and an e-mail client app. The results obtained from the focus group reveal that students already use the UOC’s mobile developments in their day-to-day activities and expect this use to increase in the future. The principal recommendations address the need to develop a mobile learning environment with the scalability to accommodate new functionalities and services and the multi-device capability to meet the students’ choice of device, and the importance of a user-centered design (UCD) approach to meet student requirements.