Support for Mobile Devices

Mobile devices, smartphones and tablets, are increasingly important for us to support as they gain market share. By fully supporting both the mobile devices themselves and highly-dynamic wireless connections common on these types of devices, we enable distance learning to become mobile.

Education no longer has to be anchored in the classroom, office or the study at home. It is free to roam with users.

Support for mobile devices begins with our web pages. All web pages within our website (public informational pages, courses, lectures, events and community pages) are based on "responsive design" that contain programming to make the elements on the page intelligent whereby pages automatically re-size and re-arrangement themselves to best fit the capabilities of each. Our pages can sense the capabilities of the device being used to view the page and automatically "respond" by best-fitting all of the page elements. As a result, we optimally support desktop displays, tablets and smartphone with one common design that is "smart" and can respond to technical specifications of each device viewing one of our pages.

On desktops, we support almost all desktop web browsers. On mobile devices, we support both Apple's iOS and Google's Android operating systems on smartphones and tablets.

As an example, picture below is the our home page as viewed on a 1,920 x 1,080 desktop browser on a Windows notebook, an Android S3 smartphone with Chrome Mobile, an Apple iPhone 6 with Safari Mobile, and a 7” LG Android tablet with Chrome Mobile. Each device is displaying the page just as it comes up (no zooming or horizontal scrolling required.) The coding in the responsive design handles the re-sizing and even re-arrangement of page elements to best fit diverse specifications on any desktop or mobile device employed by our users.

To continue the responsive design concept, all of our media players that are embedded in our web pages (and carry or media) have also been made responsive; they, too, also re-size and scale to best fit the device.

Also, our media players will play our media on all devices, desktop and mobile. Our media can play or Windows or Macs as well as on iOS and Android devices. We equally support devices that use Adobe Flash (RMTP) as well as HTTP Live Streaming (HLS.)

Finally, and very importantly, our Adaptive Streaming technology ideally support adapting the speed of our media to the broadband connection of each mobile device. Stream switching is very important in our support of mobile devices because wireless connections are extremely dynamic based on the congestion within cell sites and the quality of the reception based on the mobile users' locations. We support a very broad range of connections speeds that are the norm in mobile environments.

In all cases for both responsive design and Adaptive Streaming, the user doesn’t have to do anything, it is all handled automatically in the background by the technology. This very sophisticated technology makes using the site appliance-simple: it just works!

This approach (auto-sensing player and Adaptive Streaming) are in keeping with our “any-service-from-any-device” philosophy. You use the device you wish, using the connection you have (wireline or mobile) and the technology automatically adjusts without you having to do anything (no selections to make or setting to adjust). The user simply goes to one common page and the media simply works regardless of the device or connection being used to view the page.