A mobile learning application for delivering educational resources to mobile devices

Recording lectures have potential to serve as supplementary material to a conventional face-to-face lecture. One of the challenges of face-to-face lectures is the lack of persistency. In contexts of varied levels of student preparedness for higher education, such as South Africa, the lack of persistent of face-to-face lectures makes it difficult for students who struggle to understand lectures delivered in English which is a second or third language for most students. Recording of lectures provide flexibility on when and where it is played back whereby empowering students to self-pace their learning. This paper argues distribution of lecture resources as podcasts for listening to before and after class may enhance student engagement of lectures and foster interaction between student-student and student-lecturer, and student-content interaction. The use of automated approaches of recording face-to-face session, coupled with the affordances of distribution of audio via the Internet, has potential to enhance student learning and engagement with learning resources. The paper exploits the intersection between mobile devices for playback of audio media and Opencast for automated recording of face-to-face sessions and proposes a mobile framework to expose opencast artifacts to mobile devices.