[Xerte-dev] Re: Topics and subtopics?

[Smith, John]

We have had a request for it before... i'm sure it must be listed as a Github issue...

Regards,

John Smith | Learning Technologist
Room A250, Govan Mbeki Building | School of Health & Life Sciences | Glasgow Caledonian University
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From: xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk [xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Smith, Bradley [brsmith at akamai.com]
Sent: 09 December 2014 16:56
To: For Xerte technical developers
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Re: Topics and subtopics?

Well, wouldn’t it be relatively simple to have properties in the “container” template that allow you to set your own names for Nth level contained objects (plus a default)?

I do agree that nobody wants to see “Page 30 of 100”, but perhaps “Section3, page 2” would be received differently? IMO the value of keeping content granular is to make organization and re-use easier, but at the presentation level I'm having trouble seeing the effect of presenting five topics as five separate LOs instead of one LO with five sections (assuming a page numbering scheme like the one above) other than adding extra clicks the student has to go through to get from topic to topic.

That said, at least as an interim solution, thank you for mentioning the bootstrap template! I think that could be a really good use for it, and I look forward to trying it out. It doesn’t address the use case of a Storyline/Articulate person who wants to export a course’s worth of content as a single SCOM SCO, but it’s a good place for me to start.

—Brad

From: Julian Tenney <Julian.Tenney at nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:Julian.Tenney at nottingham.ac.uk>>
Reply-To: For Xerte technical developers <xerte-dev at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:xerte-dev at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>>
Date: Tuesday, December 9, 2014 at 2:41 AM
To: For Xerte technical developers <xerte-dev at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:xerte-dev at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>>
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Re: Topics and subtopics?

The problem is: you want topics and sub topics? Chapters and sections? Modules, units? Sections, chapters, units? N levels? Everyone has their own take on it. It is good practice to keep the content granular: no one wants to open an LO and see ‘Page 1 of 117’.

My advice is to use a separate HTML page with link to the LOs that serves as your ‘package’, then you can structure it however you like. It could be a xerte LO itself – or a bootstrap page... you can also use a feed from a folder in the workspace, and then read that in a web page to build your menu.

From: xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk> [mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Smith, Bradley
Sent: 08 December 2014 20:33
To: For Xerte technical developers
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Topics and subtopics?

Hello all,

At first I was going to send this to the regular xerte list, but if the answer to my question is what I think it is, this will be a better audience.

I’ve set up Xerte and work and started developing content in it. Many of my colleagues use tools like Articulate and Storyline, and from what I’ve seen of the materials they create, one thing I expect they’ll want to know when I show them Xerte is “how do I create subtopics?” (as shown in the attached screenshot, which is from an internal course, so I’ve blurred out some content).

These tools give you the option to put an entire course into one SCO (or whatever), whereas, unless I’m missing something big, Xerte seems to assume that all the pages in an XOT will pertain to a single topic, and a large course will be a collection of separate XOTs, one per topic. I’ve been able to approximate subtopics using tabbed navigators, but those limit the kinds of content you can include.

Keeping content “atomic” with one topic per piece of content is a practice I would like to see encouraged, but I think it’s also reasonable to want to be able to present multiple topics in a single package, so…

First question: am I missing something?

Assuming I’m not missing anything, some follow-ups: would I encounter any objections if I tried to implement a way to do this? (no promises! just thinking out loud at this point). Have there been any efforts to implement this sort of feature that I should know about?

I think if I was going to try to implement something like this, instead of implementing topics and subtopics per se, I would want to look into the possibility of integrating existing XOTs into a larger “container” page. For example, create one XOT per topic in a sort of library hosted in Xerte, and what goes in your course is a container XOT that pulls content from an arbitrary number of topic Los in the library, treating each one as a topic in its TOC, like the section headings in that screen shot. This would both allow for more comprehensive XOTs, and truly re-usable content, something that IMO not enough content creation/management tools emphasize.

People who understand templates and the guts of XOTs better than me (I.e. just about everyone): is the above doomed? Or maybe possible?

—Brad


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