One of our goals for this year was to enable iQualify learners to be able to take their study offline, for situations where they may be travelling, or knowing they’re going somewhere without good internet connectivity.

Save course to home screen

From today, learners who access a course on a compatible Android device will be asked if they wish to add that course to their home screen. (If they choose not to right now, learners can do so manually later). The course’s text and image content will be downloaded to their device, with a new icon appearing on their home screen, so that they can read the course content offline.

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Progressive Web Apps

This is all made available through a technology called Progressive Web Apps. PWAs are still reasonably new technology, but are well supported on Android devices using Google Chrome or the default Android browser.

PWAs are experimental

Being new technology, we’re releasing this as an experimental feature. At the moment, none of the ‘interactive’ content in a course will be saved to the device or work offline. We’d really love to get feedback from you about how your learners are finding this new experience - let us know through the in-app chat function, contact your Account Manager or flick us an email. We’ll be taking this into account as we further enhance the functionality around offline study for learners.

Going offline on desktop

iQualify also does a neat little trick for many desktop & laptop users who don’t have access to PWA technology. For learners using a compatible desktop browser, iQualify courses are saved to a learner’s computer on a module by module basis. Each time a learner visits a module, the non-interactive content is stored on the computer in a similar fashion to the Progressive Web App (without the Add to Homescreen step), so this will work if the learner subsequently navigates to that module, on the same device, without an internet connection.

Compatible desktop browsers include the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Opera, with Microsoft's Edge expected to become compatible in the near future.