e-Learning Authoring Tools (eLAT)

Those clever folks at the University of Nottingham have been at it again! A while ago I asked via the Xerte Teachers JISC mailist what the best way was to correctly attribute images sourced via Flickr Creative Commons in a Xerte Toolits learning object. The suggested solutions were useful, if a little clunky, and mainly involved adding snippets of html to Xerte pages (some other solutions are proposed by Ron Mitchell in this learning object). However, Patrick Lockley and Julian Tenney at Nottingham have now come up with a far more practical and elegant solution.

The tool is distributed online via the JISC-funded Xerte Public E-learning Repository (XPERT). It is essentially an Ajax web search for images, video and audio that uses custom APIs to search for Creative Commons-licensed content from Flickr and Wikimedia Commons (the Flickr content should be ’safe’). Where it goes (way) beyond, say, an advanced search for reusable images in Google, is in the way it allows you to embed the attribution in the image itself, select an optimum size for using in Xerte Online Toolkits, and even choose to embed in a Powerpoint slide.

To test the tool, do the following:

• go to http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/attribution
• enter your search term in the search box and click the search button
• wait for 5-10 seconds for the results to appear
• choose a suitable image/sound/video and click ’select’
• click on your output option (e.g original size with attribution, a size optimised for Xerte, Powerpoint etc.)
• the image will open in a new tab or window where you can save it (or embed the code if you use that output option)

This is a very useful tool for anyone searching for a way to correctly and efficiently attribute open content. Even better for Xerte Toolkits users is the news that the developers are planning to integrate the tool into a wizard in an upcoming release.

Factoids of the day: Xerte stands for Xml Editor and Run-Time Engine. eXe (no, not that exe but this one) stands for eLearning XHTML editor. Both are excellent free, open-source tools for creating interactive elearning content. But, without getting all Harry Hill about it, which is the best tool for our purposes?

Over the past few weeks I’ve had a go at creating content with both tools. Nothing flashy, just some basic page-types containing some text and images, sound and video, simple quizzes and some interaction with Google Maps, YouTube and Wikipedia. Both tools do these basics extremely well, without the need to know how to code. If I had to choose in terms of usability and aesthetics I’d go with the Xerte Toolkits as I think its easier to get going with creating interactive pages, and, while neither tool is going to win any design awards for the way they look and feel, Xerte just about wins out for me. But, perhaps more importantly, what about functionality and support?

The Xerte Online Toolkits supports a wide range of page types including formatted text, graphics and sound, video (in Flash format), audio and video transcripts, embedded documents (using Flash paper), screen captures (from Jing and Captivate), tabbed and accordian page navigation, basic charts, image hotspots, Google Maps, Wikipedia and Flickr integration, and many different interactive quiz types from multiple-choice and gap fill to timeline and matching pair activities.

eXe while not offering the same range of page templates (called iDevices) does offer some advantages over Xerte in terms of functionality; it supports Quicktime, WMV and Real Media video files, for example, and has better handling of mathematical symbols (as Joe outlined in a previous post). eXe also outputs to the new common cartridge specification for handling elearning content, and can be installed on Windows, Mac OS and Linux machines compared to the stand-alone Xerte (Windows only) or Xerte Online Toolkits which is web-based and requires installation on a server. One further advantage is that eXe seems to integrate better with Moodle in terms of capturing ‘live’ learner data. For example one of the iDevices enables a Moodle page to be shown within a frame so that learners can switch seamlessly to various Moodle activities and have their responses captured in Gradebook or Journal.

In my opinion there are three main areas in which Xerte outdoes eXe: these are (a) support/development, (b) accessibility and (c) ease with which open content can be created. Xerte is being actively developed by the team at the University of Nottingham and there is a wealth of tutorials and other support information available including a ‘Xerte for teachers’ JISCmail group and regular monthly online sessions (eXe, on the other hand, is no longer being actively developed with those involved having moved over to the Wikieducator project). Accessibility is built right into the software with end users able to customise a wide range of options in the learning object including the colour scheme, font, font size and screen size. There are also text to speech option. Xerte also offers options for creating re-usable open educational resources with a creative commons license via a properties tab. Xerte is currently being widely used to create open content through projects such as the JISC-funded XPERT (Xerte Public E-learning ReposiTory) and is being adopted as an elearning tool by a number of HE institutions in the UK such as the Universities of Plymouth and Nottingham.

To sum up, both eXe and Xerte are very useful tools which allow teachers and learning technologists to design simple but pedagogically sound interactive elearning content which can be integrated into a VLE. Neither has the power of something like Adobe Captivate but then both are freely available and, certainly in the case of Xerte, are backed by a network of users in HE. For me, Xerte has the edge when it comes to design, usability, functionality and support but both are very capable tools for authoring content without the need to know HTML.