e-Learning Authoring Tools (eLAT)

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.

I can confirm that maths input in Xerte is pretty straightforward – it’s a matter of including a string of LaTeX code within a single tag. I’m aware that part of what authoring tools sell is the promise of hiding tags and code from authors – but knowing how much of a sticking point maths inclusion can be, I think this solution is appropriate. (Further information on maths in Xerte is available here.)

For the 3-week course in creating online tutorial using free authoring software (next month), I notice that some colleagues in the Foreign Language Centre are going to attend. In preparation, I’ve confirmed that east Asian characters can be added to tutorials in both eXe and Xerte, and I just need to investigate whether the correct display of the tutorials is dependent on fonts on the student’s computer. Scoping such problems before the course will enable us to focus on the learning and teaching potential of eXe and Xerte, and less on working out functionality.

After my presentation this afternoon, I was asked about maths support in authoring tools. The screenshot below shows how this happens in eXe. LaTeX code can be input directly, or you can select some of the more common mathematical symbols from a symbol editor. Each equation or other portion of mathematical content is output as an image file, over whose appearance you have some degrees of control. The typefaces/alignment/rendering are not of as lofty a standard as that available through LaTeX, but I’m impressed with the functionality and quality myself.