“Do you have a mobile app?” It is not a question we get every day, but with nearly a third of our new users accessing our courses via a mobile device or tablet, we hear the question often enough. While we do not have a custom-built app, the organization that built the open-source software that drives our courses (Moodle™) does.
Of course, our site is responsive, designed to work well on small screens, and we think that most students will find that using Saylor Academy in their preferred phone browsers will meet their needs for learning on the go. But for those students who want a more app-like mobile experience or who just like to tinker, we invite you to try out the Moodle Mobile app, available for Android, iOS, and Windows devices (including as a desktop app for Windows 8.1 and up).
To be clear, we didn’t make this app, we haven’t spent much time with it, and it is not as polished or as customized for Saylor Academy as we would like, but it does work with our courses and offers useful features like limited offline browsing. It isn’t a complete replacement for accessing courses through a computer or mobile browser, however — some functions are not available yet in the app or don’t work properly with our site (like certain kinds of quizzes/exams).
Get Moodle Mobile from the App Store (iOS), Google Play (Android) or the Windows Store (PC or phone) here.
Getting Saylor Academy up and running on the Moodle Mobile app:
Once you have downloaded the app, you will only need to tell the app where to find our courses and sign in to your Saylor Academy account.
1. For the site address, enter https://learn.saylor.org
2. Log in with your username/email and password
3. Any courses you have already enrolled in will appear under My courses — note that you can use the cloud icon to download some materials (good if you are not always on a strong network or want to save some mobile data when out and about)
A couple known quirks:
- You cannot enroll in courses via the app — please use the regular website to add courses to your dashboard
Text paragraphs in certain sections of courses do not have correct spacing between them
If you are a developer who wants to look behind the curtain, you can download the latest version of the app from GitHub and run it directly in your browser (Firefox worked for us, but not Chrome or Safari). Other than a couple CSS tweaks we made, you will see what mobile users see. Moodle’s documentation is here.
That’s all for now — try out the app, if you wish, and let us know what you think!