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PurposeThis paper aims to present findings of a study that was carried out to identify strategies of enabling learners in developing countries to fully exploit the potential of learning management systems (LMSs). The study set out to: identify the services of learning management systems that are most needed and desired by university learners in developing countries; and identify appropriate access strategies that would guide design decisions on how to effectively and satisfactorily deliver such services to the university students in developing countries.Design/methodology/approachA total of 144 students from two African universities participated in the study by responding to an online survey questionnaire. The questionnaire asked students: how often they accessed LMSs to obtain, create and exchange information and knowledge; their preference for the different devices used for accessing the LMS; the LMS services they are most often required to access; and the services they most desire to use.FindingsThe findings of the survey indicate that the most desired and most accessed LMS services by the students include: assignments, announcements, resources, course outlines and the chat room. At the same time, mobile phones are rated the least used devices for accessing the LMS services, mainly due to inadequate design of LMSs for mobile interaction.Originality/valueThe paper also presents mobile LMS interface designs and ideas achieved through a participatory design process for enhancing the accessibility of the most needed and desired LMS services on mobile phones.

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Digital Libraries (DLs) have traditionally been positioned at the intersection of library science, computer science, and networked information systems. The different underlying philosophies of these three fields has had an unsettling influence on the development of DLs. While library science is fairly mature, networked information systems are constantly evolving to keep pace with Internet innovation. DLs are thus expected to demonstrate the careful management of libraries while supporting standards that evolve at an astonishing pace. This architectural moving target is a predicament that all DLs face sooner or later in their lifecycle, and one that few manage to deal with effectively. To exacerbate this problem, there has been a general desire for systems to be interoperable at the levels of data exchange and service collaboration. Such interoperability requirements necessitated the development of standards such as the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set and the Open Archives Initiative's Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). These standards have achieved a degree of success in the DL community largely because of their generality and simplicity. Informed by those lessons, this project is an attempt to consistently extend known interoperability standards to form the basis of a framework of components for building extensible DLs.

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