With the mobile devices crowding out PC’s as the preferred method of consuming knowledge and completing online courses it may do us well to revisit some tried and true design best practices.
Using the LMS to support your course will include attaching documents for the students to access. Keep in mind the type format of the uploaded documents and what kind of devices can open them. It has been recommended to use the pdf format if possible. Also look at the size of your document, if you have illustrations or pictures, make use of the compression options to minimize the size of your document.
The Canvas LMS has a great rich-text editor and can accept the copy and paste from outside content. The issue here is the content may bring along it’s own code that can be problematic for devices to read your content accurately. Get with the eLearning department to see how we can help clean up the code. This extraneous code can also impede your ADA students from accessing your content.
Tables are a great way to organize your content and looks great on your PC screen but items will get skewed on mobile devices. Limiting the use of tables will keep your content view-able and to scale on all devices.
Audio and video content are rich avenues to present content but can be bandwidth hogs for mobile devices. Consider using streaming applications to help lighten the load. Also consider chunking the larger audio and video files into smaller sections. This will help with file size and student attention spans.
Remind students to keep their devices, operating systems and browsers up to date periodically. Canvas recommends using Mozilla Firefox for Android and Windows devices while Safari and Puffin are recommended for the iOS devices.
Sometimes we have to add content to our courses that is just not mobile friendly. If you are trying to create a mobile friendly environment you may consider creating a non-mobile friendly alert for such content.
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