e-Learning Authoring Tools (eLAT)

One of the nicer aspects of using eLearning authoring tools such as Xerte, eXe or Articulate is that they can be used to create Open Educational Resources (OER). In fact the Xerte Online Toolkits has open content functionality built-in to the properties of the learning object: you can choose a creative commons license and whether or not to include it in an institution’s Open Courseware feed (for more see the OpenCourseware Consortium (OCW)). In the Division for Lifelong Learning we are currently involved in a project to create OER Study Skills material (using Xerte Online Toolkits) for embedding in an online course delivered via Moodle as a core unit for our foundation degrees. As we are taking our first steps in the emerging field of OER it might be useful to ask what they are, why create them and give some examples of where you might find some online.

What are ‘Open Educational Resources’?

Open Education Resources (OER) have their roots in the philosophy and practice of the open source computer software movement which rose to prominence in the 1990s. The idea of incorporating open content and open access initiatives into formal education gained prominence with the backing of a number of global bodies including the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, UNESCO, the Open Society Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation. The latter two organisations came together in September 2007 to draft the Cape Town Open Education Declaration.

OER refers to any resource used in education (think: lecture slides, handout, reading list, audio/video podcast, image, interactive learning object, textbook, whole course) that is made freely available for others to use, share, repurpose or remix. Importantly, as Joss Winn and others have pointed out, OER is not just about the ‘content’ or end product, it is also very much about the people involved in their creation, usage and (re)distribution, together with the tools they use.

OERs usually have no, or limited, property rights associated with them; that is, they can either be in the public domain (no property rights) or have one of a range of creative commons licenses (limited rights) which allow them to be reused or shared, for example in non-commercial settings with proper attribution.

OERs are usually digital in format, and have been created using digital technologies. That is not to say they have to be – a reading list or physical textbook, for example, could be opened up for sharing and/or repurposing. Depending on the license associated with the OER, the content can be customised, improved upon, (re)mixed with other OERs, repurposed and redistributed. Or it can simply be (re)used without any modification (McGreal and Anderson, 2009).

Why create OERs?

There are a huge amount of benefits associated with the creation of open educational content, both on an institutional and personal level.

On a macro level – and the continued digital divide notwithstanding – OERs have the potential to reduce global inequalities by making good quality resources available to all, including sections of the world population that otherwise may not have access to formal education. As an integral part of the knowledge/information commons OERs contribute to the public good and reinforce the lofty ideals that education should be freely accessible by all (some would argue this is a basic human right). OERs are well suited to allow anybody to access them, at any time, at any point in their life cycle.

On an institutional level as well as bringing in external funding (through, for example, JISC in the UK), OERs can showcase the work of universities and colleges globally. Oxford University’s podcast series on iTunes, for example, has had over 3 million downloads since its launch in October 2008. OERs can encourage outreach into local (and global) communities and promote collaboration and participation by academic staff, students and other stakeholders (Yuan, MacNeill and Kraan, 2008). Granularity is a feature of OER with the reuse of the smallest learning object (e.g a reading list in Word) alongside the possibility of reusing whole courses or even entire programmes.

On a more personal level OERs can encourage creativity, collaboration and a participatory culture amongst those involved in their creation and distribution. The open and free nature of OERs encourage flexible use and delivery options, and have the potential to involve students as co-creators of knowledge rather than passive consumers.

With all benefits come barriers. Potential impediments to the successful implementation of OERs in a formal setting include issues around sustainability, interoperability, funding, legal/copyright issues and the thorny issue of quality control. For more discussion of the benefits and barriers see Yuan, MacNeill and Kraan (2008).

For a critical perspective on OER see this blog post by Richard Hall (De-Montford University) which links OER to wider issues of democratisation and radical educational practice. Also useful is this document on sustainability published as the ‘Leeds Manifesto’ involving representatives from some of the leading OER projects in UK HEIs.

Examples

One of the first OER projects to emerge was MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative which began in 2001 and aims to make over 2000 of its courses freely available to the public as open content. Since then a large number of institutions in the UK and elsewhere have become involved in OER projects. These include:

• Oxford University’s OpenSpires podcasts
• Leicester University’s OTTER project
• Nottingham University’s BERLiN project
• University of Lincoln’s Chemistry.FM
• Leeds Metropolitan University’s Unicycle project
• Open University’s OpenLearn
• Rice University’s Connexions
• Utah State University’s OpenCourseWare
• California State University’s MERLOT project
• Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative

For practical advice on the creation of OER see the excellent JISC Infokit and UNESCO Infokit. There are also some useful search engines focused on OER including DiscoverEd and OCWfinder.

References

McGreal and Anderson, T. (2009) ‘Open Educational Resources’. Retrieved 27/07/10 from http://auspace.athabascau.ca:8080/dspace/bitstream/2149/2327/5/oer.pdf

Yuan, L., MacNeill, S. and Kraan, W. (2008) ‘Open Educational Resources – Opportunities and Challenges for Higher Education.’ JISC CETIS. Retrieved 27/07/10 from http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/9302

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.

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.

A quick post, with promises of more frequent posts to come…

The staff development course in late June/early July went well, with a small group of staff members from across the University using eXe to create engaging online tutorials. I’m also introducing eXe later on this week to my Italian teacher, who had signed up to the course but could not attend. On the basis of the course and of the 1:1 sessions, I’ll be producing an introduction to eXe tutorials as an eXe tutorial – much like Shakespeare’s plays within plays – and improving the way I’ve been noting the best practice of using eXe for learning & teaching purposes.

From the work I do (outside this project) with colleges partnered with the University, I’ve found out that the e-Learning Coordinator at Swindon College is enthusiastic about endorsing Xerte to lecturers and tutors there. He has had fundamental difficulties with the server-based toolkits installation (which is what we are testing here), but uses the standalone version. One of the lecturers is keen to use activities revolving around images with hotspots – beyond the current version of eXe but certainly possible in Xerte. So I will be resuming my inspection of Xerte – at least for this purpose, and perhaps more widely.