Clarifying the digital content output formats for mobile learning in higher education

Mobile learning (m-learning) is an emerging area of distance education and there is a great interest in incorporating it in higher education, due to the mobile devices capabilities which are rapidly increasing and renders mobile devices more efficient and more attractive to students. On the other hand, the educational content plays a significant role in the process of delivering knowledge, especially in the field of distance education. The delivery of the web content for mobile devices depends on heterogeneous software and hardware environments; therefore, web content adaptation to various mobile environments is a challenge for the educational institutions. The Hellenic Open University (HOU), an educational institution which offers distance learning courses, has started to emphasize on the arising importance of m-learning with the aim to involve it in the educational process. Towards this direction, in this paper we aim to define different file formats of the digital educational content that can be reproduced by mobile devices regardless of the various operating systems. The clarification of the digital content output formats for mobile learning will contribute to the creation of a number of analytic guides with detailed technical specifications for the development of educational content for mobile devices.