One of the greatest benefits of the explosion in mobile technology is that it brings education to the most remote locations in the world. The high penetration rate of mobile technology, even in the most impoverished areas, is a great opportunity for governments, nonprofit organizations and educators. 

Moodle is a Course Management System (CMS), a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). As a free web application, it is available for educators so they can use it to create online learning sites.

The new Moodle HQ is a HTML5-based mobile app for both Android (News – Alert) and iOS. It is designed to work on and offline and provides several of the applications features including activities, access to courses and course materials, and notifications. Users can also record audio and images and upload them to private file areas, send private messages to other course participants, take notes about participants and create contacts.

Moving to HTML5 will give Moodle the tools it needs to release updates across all platforms at the same time and let modularity and greater participation from the developing community. The code is open source and it will give developers and institutions the ability to customize, expand, and brand it using CSS (News – Alert).

This open source platform has been used to create dynamic online websites by educators for their students in many different settings, including prisons. The features allow it to be scaled for large deployments of students numbering in the thousands, but at the same time it can be used for teaching small or individualized classes.

The new application needs Moodle 2.4 with mobile Web services activated with iOS version 4.3 or newer or Android 2.1 or newer. It is available at Apple (News – Alert) iTunes stores and Google Play. In order to work, it has to be installed on a Web server on a personal computer or at a Web hosting company.