Hello,
I’m Sarah. I’ve been asked by my college (a small creative arts college in the UK) to look at supporting our internal communications with students by investigating mobile ‘apps’ that link calendars, moodle etc all in one place on phones. I wondered if any of the Reclaim services would support the building of something like this - or even if there’s a more imaginative solution! It might sound crazy for a visual arts college, but rather than hand things over to business, perhaps we should work with our students to code one? Any advice or ideas or signposting that the super-clever people on here could offer would be so much appreciated. Thank-you!
Hi Sarah,
One of the tricks with mobile apps is having them run cleanly on all devices, not to mention developing for all devices which is usually a very different process than building mobile-friendly websites that might be linked to with an app. I’ll let others chime in here, like my partner @timmmmyboy, but providing a web hosting environment where students could develop mobile-friendly web site would make a lot of sense, but not sure if it is the best environment to build mobile apps that get vetted by Android and Apple for their devices. Does that make sense? It might also be worth posing the question back to those who made the request to make sure they want stand-alone apps rather than a mobile website.
Hope this helps,
Jim Groom
Hi Jim,
Thank-you so much for your reply. That helps enormously. My background is English Literature and Textiles so I need all the help I can get. We are looking to our VLE to be able to be used as a mobile website long-term, and I’m working in a negotiation space as I am wary of us leaving Moodle to buy in an off-the-peg edu-business VLE. I’ve been asked to think of a quick fix to trial that supports our students in accessing essential comms and VLE, but I’m super-not-sure about the ‘build your own app for free’ things out there, as they offer solutions but this - our situation - offers us the potential to teach arts students to maybe create their own solution instead. I like domain of one’s own - not sure if this is a good ‘fit’ for what I’ve been tasked with, but if there’s a ‘fit’ there I have a rare opportunity to pursue it. thanks again, Sarah.
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