POCKET

Yesterday the POCKET team, along with colleagues from the University of Derby and the University of Bolton attended a demonstration of Xerte at the University of Nottingham. Julian Tenney, the lead developer on Xerte led us through the demonstration along with his colleagues John Horton and Pat Lockley.

The description of Xerte on the Xerte Project website is:

Xerte is a suite of powerful tools for creating interactive e-learning content for the Flash platform. Xerte is open source software, in use all over the world.

The POCKET team were very keen to find out more about Xerte and how we might incorporate it or collaborate with the developers as part of our project.

Julian began the demonstration by explaining the idea behind Xerte, which is to empower people to create their own learning material. The Xerte project has created tools to allow this. Xerte was first released in 2006 and is primarily aimed at developers as it requires a certain amount of scripting. It is in use all over the world and was released as open source software in August 2008.

Accessibility was a high priority in the development of Xerte and the team have worked closely with TechDis. When Julian presented some materials that had been created in Xerte, text to speech had been built in and the material could be navigated throughout just by using the keyboard.

Some of the projects that had been created using Xerte were large and contained a lot of content, multimedia and interaction while others were at a smaller scale, with simple multiple choice questions. This helped us to see the range of material that Xerte could be applied to. Many staff and students from the University of Nottingham have created learning materials using Xerte and needed little or no technical support.

Julian explained that the plan for Xerte was to become browser-based so that instead of downloading and installing an exe file, anyone with a web browser could log on and create materials simply and effectively. Editing is done directly in the browser, so there is no need to upload any content. This would also allow collaboration with other users in developing content. These tools are built on the Xerte runtime engine, which is also to be made freely available to the wider community. All files are stored on a server and templates on a database. Version 1.0 will be released in January 2009.

The Xerte Online Toolkit contains a wide range of interactive options, including:

• Image viewer (which allows zooming in and out of an image: useful for very detailed photographs)
• Flash paper (which allows zooming in and out of a document)
• Hotspots
• Quizzes
• Third party feeds: Googlemaps and KML; Flickr; Wikipedia; YouTube; RSS feeds (Although including this type of material contains a certain amount of risk as you can never be sure what will appear)

To include a file created with the Xerte online toolkit on a webpage, the file is provided in the form of a link and also code that can be included on a webpage. Xerte will export material as a zip or SCORM package. There is an RSS feed of all content produced by Xerte online.

Everyone who attended this demonstration of Xerte was very excited and impressed with the potential of Xerte to create really engaging, interactive and highly accessible learning objects. One concern raised was that there was no version control available, so when a Xerte learning object is edited and previewed online it automatically replaces the earlier version. However the Xerte team are accepting suggestions on further developments to Xerte on their mailing list.

The question for POCKET is how can we use this toolkit in our own project. We discussed the possibility of writing a wizard file (xwd) to incorporate the OU XML schema (only working within a subset of the schema as the whole schema would be too complicated). However this is complex development work and would be time consuming to achieve, although it is something I would definitely like to try out.

Another option might be to use Xerte with academics to produce learning objects:

• This content can be exported as a package file into a VLE like Blackboard, as it is exported as SCORM
• The CETIS Transcoder tool could be used to convert the SCORM package into an IMS Package
• The IMS package could then be uploaded onto OpenLearn

At this stage the POCKET team are keen to try out Xerte and see what we can produce!

Now that POCKET is starting to work with more external partners, I have been thinking more about the content editing process. Working with content authors at Derby, the various stages of editing have so far been discussed in face-to-face meetings. However this will not always possible and it would benefit the project and also address sustainability of the materials if we could find another solution.

One possible solution could be for academic content authors to use the ‘User Revision’ option on OpenLearn.

Instructions for using the User Revision option:

1. First you have to login or register on OpenLearn, then go to the unit you want to edit.
2. Then look down the right hand menu and you will see a tab labeled ‘Versions’
3. Under this tab click on the ‘Make a copy for revising’ option
4. It may take a few minutes but when the page refreshes it will show the revision copy of the unit (you’ll also see under the ‘Versions’ tab that there is now a version labeled ‘User Revision’)
5. You’ll see a tab in the right hand top corner of the screen labeled ‘Turn editing on’
6. If you select this tab your page will change to show the various editing features.
7. If you just want to amend typos, you can go into each section (by clicking on the headings) and you’ll see three tabs at the top of the screen: ‘View’ ‘Edit’ and ‘Revisions’
8. Select the ‘Edit’ tab and you will be able to directly edit into the text. You have to write a short description of the changes you’ve made before you can click the ‘Save’ button.

I plan to add these instructions to the POCKET content development kit and make this editing facility an option for the content authors involved in POCKET. The ability to edit directly onto OpenLearn means the authors will still be able to edit the units when the project has finished.

Another factor to note at this stage is that when you re-upload a unit tags that you applied to the original unit are not saved. For example I’ve tagged the POCKET units under the tag ‘POCKET‘, but I have to re-tag them every time I edit and re-upload the unit, even if it is just a minor change. It would be useful if there was an option on OpenLearn to save the tags on a unit when you re-upload it.

The University of Westminster has won JISC’s ‘Outstanding ICT initiative of the year’ 2008 for websites which build upon pioneering work using video to mark students’ work. Lecturer Russell Stannard used screen recording software to record himself walking through various Web 2.0 technologies with a voice-over, which were then uploaded to a newly-created website available at this link: www.teachertrainingvideos.com. The site, which is openly accessible, quickly proved popular and rapidly built into a bank of over 30 videos, with lecturers frequently requesting new topics.

Its success led to the creation of another resource: www.multimediatrainingvideos.com, which offers free training videos in using more complex multimedia programmes like Flash, Director and Photoshop. In its second month, the site received nearly 60,000 hits.

These are websites that I plan to incorporate in the various resources I’m putting together for the staff development workshop at Derby. I think this is an excellent resource that staff would be very interested in. It also makes me wonder if we can include some similar video training work in our POCKET collaboration area on LabSpace, particularly now we are beginning to work with more external partners.

The Sakai Project

The Sakai CLE is a free and open source Courseware Management System. It features a set of software tools designed to help instructors, researchers and students collaborate online in support of their work–whether it be course instruction, research or general project collaboration.

This could be an interesting platform to test our POCKET materials, as the software is available for download or there are sites online set up as testing areas.