We wanted to provide greater visibility to a new TCRIL funded contribution project focused on mobile product strategy/backlog development (FC-0011). This project aims to develop and present a mobile strategy for the Open edX project that aligns with TCRIL’s mission of providing a teaching and learning platform that is accessible globally, even in limited bandwidth environments.
Below is a bit more detail on project goals. If you are interested in joining project meetings you can join #mobile-product-strategy-fc-0011 to learn more.
You are also welcome to review our initial Confluence notes pages and share comments on those or this Discourse thread. We are planning to meet a few times virtually before the Open edX conference in the coming 2 weeks.
1 Product: Deliver a mobile strategy and product roadmap to support investment focus areas over the next two years. 2Technology: Recommend next steps for technology investment to support accelerated Open edX mobile development speed and increased contributions. 3 Design: Identify experience gaps between the existing Open edX mobile applications and industry leaders in both education and related non-education applications to identify key experience investments.Additionally - As part of our technology exploration we are reviewing iOS and Android mobile applications built by a Raccoon Gang team led by @volodymyr.chekyrta . These applications offer Open edX Kotlin and Swift-based applications we could switch to as a way to accelerate development speed, contributions, and more.
I wanted to add to this post with a follow up: We are looking for community members interested in providing a bit more feedback for our mobile product + technology proposals.
1 - We are evaluating a transition (over some timeline TBD) from the existing edx-mobile applications to new codebases for both iOS and Android, written and open sourced by Raccoon Gang using the MVVM architectural patterns and fully written in Swift / Kotlin respectively.
2 - If you or your associated open edX community member has built (or currently builds) mobile applications for Open edX we need your feedback on the product roadmap but also on the technology / design direction for the project!
Please reach out here or in the Slack channel - #mobile-prod-strategy-fc-0011 if you have context / feedback you’d like to share, we would love to set up time to connect with you soon.
As a quick follow-up on this project specifically, I wanted to share that we are more seriously considering a proposal (to come in the form of an OEP) to recommend that the Open edX platform move to using two new mobile repositories as the default experiences for Open edx mobile.
The new applications are recent rewrites of the mobile experience in Swift and Kotlin, make use of MVVM architectural patterns fully and should facilitate easier contribution and faster development speeds. There is still more work to understand the feature parity comparison between our current applications and the new proposed default apps, and we plan to set up a new Product Working SubGroup focused just on mobile to continue the discussion. You can follow that on confluence here: https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/COMM/pages/3754950709/Subgroup+Mobile
Also if you’d like to see the apps and missed the Raccoon Gang announcement, they built and open sourced the new mobile applications we are considering shifting to as the default mobile repositories. (credit to @volodymyr.chekyrta and team! )