e-Learning Authoring Tools (eLAT)

Following hot on the heels of the RSC London workshop is this two-hour session run by West London Lifelong Learning Network which will take place on Friday 22nd October at North-West London College, NW10.

http://www.westlondonlln.org/events/993/xerte-training-session-creating-learning-objects

RSC London are running a workshop entitled ‘Xerte Online Toolkits for Beginners’ on Wednesday 10th November, 2010 at the Islington City Learning Centre in London. The event is free of charge and will cover the pedagogical benefits of the tool as well as introducing the range of page templates available. Much of the session will involve hands-on development of learning objects with 1-1 support.

More information about the event including how to book is available at http://www.rsc-london.ac.uk/1440/

Update: The workshop is now full – email the event administrator to be added to the waiting list.

This blog now has a new author – my name is Julian Prior and I have taken over from Joe Buchanan as eLearning Development Officer in the Division for Lifelong Learning at the University of Bath. Joe has moved on to pastures new and I have been asked to take this project forward. I want to take this opportunity to thank Joe for all his hard work and the excellent resources he has developed on this blog and elsewhere.

The focus of the blog will remain the same – to discuss issues surrounding the design, implementation and use of learning content authored using elearning tools such as Xerte and eXe. Other tools are available to design rich, interactive elearning content – Udutu, Adobe Captivate and GLO Maker, for example. However, eXe and Xerte were chosen for this pilot project for a number of reasons, not least of which are that both tools are free, open source, cross-platform and integrate well with our VLE.

Although the central themes in this blog will revolve around the use of eXe and Xerte (mostly Xerte for reasons I will outline in my next post) I hope the content will appeal to a wider audience, particularly those interested in more general issues to do with the process of designing ’stand-alone’ elearning content. As well as my post here at Bath I am also in the latter stages of an MSc. in Education, Technology and Society at Bristol University. One of the core modules is Design and Development for Learning (DDL) which covers the principles of effective user-centred design, drawing on work done by Futurelab in Bristol. I plan to use some of the concepts, methods and ideas that came out of this module (as well as the MSc. more generally) in future posts.