Abstract:

In the modern era we are going through, with its ever-increasing rhythms, two other special and decisive features have been added worldwide: the Covid-19 and the “distance”. The pandemic invaded our lives unexpectedly, imposing basic operations remotely on various areas of our lives. Gatherings by distance, work by distance, distance medical diagnosis and distance learning. And while distance education existed as a practice mainly in non-formal education, overnight trainees and teachers at all levels of formal and non-formal education had to be able to operate remotely. A solution had to be found immediately to continue the educational process without obstacles. Thus, teachers were asked to find alternative ways of distance learning using asynchronous education platforms (e-me, e-class, e-learning, etc.), synchronous (Microsoft teams, zoom, webex, skype, viber etc..) or both. An important part of distance education is learning with the use of mobile devices namely m-learning. The purpose of this paper is to present and examine some useful existing no code and low-code development platforms for the development of a stand-alone application for educational purposes at the lowest possible cost, then to analyze their features as well as their potential uses from the perspective of a teacher and how they serve the educational process. To this end, an extensive internet research took place and the most common development platforms were identified and recorded. By using and analyzing eight representative development platforms and their corresponding set of features and services that each considered platform can support, the researchers reached the conclusion that nowadays it is possible for all teachers to create an application and the lack of programming skills is not an obstacle to keep themselves up-to-date.

Keywords:

Development platforms, application, distance, m-learning, education.