During a recent professional development workshop for teachers using Moodle, about 12 different participants each downloaded and installed the official iPhone app so that they could try it out. All were able to successfully connect to our 2.2 Moodle web site. All were able to access courses that they were enrolled in as students as well as those courses they were assigned to teach. The problem we encountered had to do with the upload feature as only about half of the participants were ever actually able to upload photos or audio to their private files repository using the app and their iphones. Since several theories were proposed we spent some time testing them out. First we tried to eliminate account and role settings variables by using a single test account that we knew could be successful. The results were identical in that the exact same phones either worked or didn't. At that point we decided to examine each phone to see if we could discover anything that they had in common, as at first we thought that the issue might be related to either the carrier, iphone model or the IOS version. When we compared all the phones that could upload with those that could not, we were still puzzled as we couldn't find any common factor and found both successes and failures with ATT and Verizon phones as well as with iPhone 3G, 4 and 4S models. It also didn't seem to matter which version of the IOS phones were running. We did see more success with phones that were using the cellular network rather than wifi but disabling wifi didn't solve the problem either. Has anyone else run into anything like this? I was hoping that updating the Moodle installation to 2.3 might make a difference but still no joy. Since then I've been reviewing server logs etc. and troubleshooting but haven't been able to produce any definative answers. Can anyone shed any light? All thoughts and suggestions will be appreciated. Thanks!
Uploading using the official iPhone app and different iPhones
Re: Uploading using the official iPhone app and different iPhones
Also fyi we are dropping My Moodle app development to focus on a new HTML5 version: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=206736. Anyway thanks again for this effort, it's really nice to read report of big testing phase like that
Re: Uploading using the official iPhone app and different iPhones
Thanks so much for the quick response and good suggestions. I don't think the issue I'm seeing is related to file size as uploading from a computer and web browser interface works without problems for all types of accounts using the same file. For the most part the same seems true of phones although I do think that looking at various phones and their camera and photo storage settings and preferences etc. might be worth checking and comparing. My main interest in the app is because the upload feature offers a quick and simple way for users to transfer media directly to Moodle without the use of outside respositories like Drop Box which some districts might not favor or could even block. We've been seeing a lot of US K-12 public school iPad initiatives lately so this looked like it might offer at least a temporary work around since uploading via the file picker won't work with IOS devices.
Re: Uploading using the official iPhone app and different iPhones
Note that iOS6 (which will be released within weeks) DOES allow you to upload photos and videos directly into upload forms on Moodle, so make sure you upgrade to that!
I've tried it on a developer version of iOS6 and it's pretty sweet.