Chapter 4: Maslo: An Open Source Platform For Mobile Development

The Mobile Access to Supplemental Learning Objects (MASLO) project is an open source software initiative by the Academic Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Laboratory (AADL Co-Lab) at the University of Wisconsin-Extension. This chapter describes how MASLO is intended to offer part of a solution to increase access to multimedia content on smartphones. MASLO can be considered a mobile learning kit with three components: an authoring tool, a web storage system, and Android® and iOS® mobile applications. The authors lead the MASLO research and development effort at the AADL Co-Lab.

The current landscape of mobile learning presents an incredible scale of opportunity for outreach based on the current state of technology development. The explosion in micro-computing over the last five years has put more computers into the hands of more people than at any point in history. In addition, as processing power continues to increase and processors for smartphones become increasingly energy efficient, the forecast is for this trend to continue with more people owning powerful handheld computing devices (Cocotas, 2012).