Portability and Usability of Open Educational Resources on Mobile Devices: A Study in the Context of Brazilian Educational Portals and Android-Based Devices

Open Educational Resources (OER) are freely accessible, openly licensed hypertext, audio, video, simulations, games and animations that are useful for teaching and learning purposes. In order to facilitate the location of such resources, educational content portals are being created, crowding contents that were produced by different teams with different technologies usually designed to be accessed by conventional computers equipped with keyboard, mouse and a medium sized screen. Since these resources are available in Internet and with the popularity of smartphones and tablets it is necessary to study the portability and the usability of these resources when accessed by these devices, which user interact with fingers. Due the changing of the input modalities and other device's characteristics some usability problems can occur and can impair the use of these resources in mobile devices. This exploratory study intended to raise and analyze possible difficulties of interaction between users and educational software designed for desktop accessed through mobile devices like tablet and smartphone. We discuss data about three educational resources accessed in two android-based mobile devices, a smartphone and a tablet, and identified several problems that resources' developers need to take account to produce resource for be accessed in desktops and mobile devices and the problem of download and running OER on mobile devices