Designing Your Course For a Mobile Experience#
Keep in mind that the courses and course content that you create should be accessible to everyone, regardless of any physical limitation that they might have, and regardless whether they are accessing your course using a Web browser or using mobile apps.
For information about accessibility best practices, see Accessibility Best Practices Checklist.
The percentage of learners who access online courses using smartphones is increasing every day. Courses on your instance may be viewed on smartphones using the Android app and iPhone app, although we still recommend that learners complete graded assignments on a desktop computer, depending on the type of assessments that their courses include. For information on which exercises and tools are mobile-ready, see the table in the Mobile-Ready Problem Types section.
To make the course experience for mobile learners as rewarding as it is for learners using desktop computers, keep the following best practices in mind as you design, test, and run your course.
Course updates that you make might take longer to appear in the mobile apps than on your course site.
Display names are critical for navigating through courses on smartphones. As you create course content, make sure you replace the default display names for every component with useful course component names.
Keep display names and labels concise. Long display names and labels might wrap on smaller screens, or might not be easily viewable. For example, if several components have names that all start with the first five words and differ only after that, learners using smartphones to access your course might have difficulty distinguishing between components.
Do not use Flash, which is not supported on mobile platforms, to create course content.
Only use iFrames in course content where necessary, because iFrame content might not be responsive and cannot be optimized for viewing on a range of devices.
If you develop course components in HTML, including course announcements, make sure you set relative rather than explicit sizes for objects such as images, tables, text, and so on, so that they will scale appropriately when viewed on displays of different sizes.
Learners might be viewing your course materials on screens as large as a high-resolution 4K display, or as small as a 5 inch smartphone screen, so it is difficult to size an image so that it displays well at all resolutions. In general, it is recommended to keep most images under 0.5MB in size so that learners who have low Internet bandwidth will not have trouble downloading the images. If you have a large image that requires zooming to view the full detail, in addition to providing an image that can be easily downloaded, link to a full resolution copy that can be opened separately from the course.
When you make choices about the problem types to use for graded and ungraded assignments in your course, or which problem types to present in a single unit, keep the mobile experience in mind. Whenever possible, use mobile-ready assessment types. If you use assessment types that are not supported on smartphones, notify learners in the body of your course that they will not be able to complete assignments that contain unsupported assessment types using the iPhone and Android mobile apps.
Timed and proctored exams cannot be completed using the mobile app.
When learners access your course using the Android and iPhone apps, they progress from component to component by swiping through them. It might seem useful to include a Text component in a unit for the purpose of providing a demarcation point or guiding learners to the next unit, but having to swipe through too many “markers” with no real course content is not a good experience for mobile users.
Make sure your JavaScript and CSS are compliant. You should verify that all components render correctly in the Android and iPhone apps as well as directly in the LMS.
Testing Your Course For Mobile Devices#
If you have included some of the more complex problem types, or have highly customized the way course content displays, it is recommended that you test your course for multiple devices and displays.
To test the mobile experience of your course, sign in to your course using the Android or iPhone app, and view each course unit to make sure that it renders as you expect it to. You can preview content that is not yet available to learners by publishing units that are within sections that are not yet released.
See also
Open edX® Accessibility Guidelines (concept)
Accessibility Best Practices Checklist (reference)
Maintenance chart
Review Date |
Working Group Reviewer |
Release |
Test situation |
2025-03-03 |
Sarina Canelake |
Sumac |
Pass |