[Xerte] Questions about Templates Error, WYSIWYG, Open Source license,

Tue Feb 2 20:00:49 GMT 2010

Hi Chris

Your feedback is much appreciated.

With reference to open sourceness and commercial startups I would make a
strong plea (as someone with no formal ties to Xerte) that Xerte users
took a harvesting approach rather than a mining approach and ensured
sustainability by replanting seeds - whether by constructive feedback or
technical contributions.

I'm involved in several national teacher training programmes including a
new IT qualification in accessible IT practices. The vast majority of
successful e-learning uptake in the UK is on the back of free and open
source software: Xerte, eXe, Moodle, Audacity, Camstudio etc.  Whatever
the legality of commercialising open source, in my humble opinion it
robs from community capital and is ethically wrong. Far better would be
to develop improvements (eg there are still  accessibility enhancements
waiting to be made like colour change on sub pages) and recycle these
into the community.

I'd also point out that the Xerte team are excellent at responding to
technical queries - something they can justify to their purse holders if
it feeds back into an enhanced product but impossible to justify if it
simply bolsters a commercial rival.

I hope this doesn't come across as a soapbox and I appreciate your
integrity in raising the question honestly. I've seen the way open
source software has transformed the educational experiences of disabled
learners (and the rest!) and I get a bit protective about preserving the
culture of collaboration that has been quite transformative in many
sectors in the UK.

Alistair

From: xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
[mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Christopher
King
Sent: 02 February 2010 17:25
To: Xerte discussion list
Subject: Re: [Xerte] Questions about Templates Error, WYSIWYG, Open
Source license,

 Wow...

Firstly, let me just thank you both, Julian and Alistair for all the
terrific feedback.

===  Regarding the problems I'm having with the xtp templates...

Ok..here is what is happens when I  follow the instructions in the
"Dynamic Templates with Xerte" document for "Installing a Template
Package":

The instructions say... 

	To install a template package created by other Xerte users,
select 'Install

	Template Package' from the templates menu. Browse to the file
you've been sent,

	and Xerte will install it.  (although on the v.2.10 of the
editor, which I just downloaded and installed yesterday, the menu item
actually only says "Install Template")

After downloading and unzipping the "templates" folder (download link
for which is found on pg 3), I select Templates >> Install Template and
when the dialog box appears, I browse to any of the three template
packages, hotspots.xtp, presentation.xtp and simplequiz.xtp and attempt
to open.  However, each attempt results in an error pop-up that simply
says "invalid file format" (see attachment).

=== Regarding the WYSIWYG authoring interface concept...

	>The interesting debate is around the tension between powerful
flexible tools that can do anything you need to, and tools that anyone
can use, with very little learning curve. I don't think there is the
'one' tool.

I do completely agree that there is a tension (inverse relationship,
"scales balance" or however one wishes to put it) between authoring
power and ease-of-use.  Indeed, this is true of virtually all categories
of software application. But my hypothetical "holy grail" of e-learning
authoring tools does not need to meet the high-powered standard of "can
do anything you need", nor would I want it to.  Indeed, my frustration
with most e-learning authoring tools on the market is that most lean too
far toward "powerful and full-featured" at the expense of "ease-of-use".
And while there are a handful that lean more toward ease-of-use, these
are far too expensive for most academic institutions to afford more than
a handful of licenses.

	>Who do you mean by instructors? Academics at your institution?
I don't think that even a WYSIWYG editor will get them doing what is
essentially programming, and they will need some skills with scripting.

Yes, I do mean instructors, academics at our institution.  Granted, as a
satellite campus of a major research university which has recently
reinvented itself as Florida USA's first public, polytechnic
institution, our faculty tend to be more open to technology-supported
educational delivery than those at many of our peer institutions.  We've
had some success training and encouraging instructors to develop rich,
interactive content for online and hybrid courses using tools such as
Camtasia, Softchalk, Dreamweaver even Flash.  But the reality is that
because most of these tools are expensive and take far many hours of
time to master (and often time/willingness to learn scripting and
markup), our instructor's need for low-cost, easy-to-use rapid
development tools will often drive them back to using the tired, old
standards of PowerPoint and pdf to present content.

While I agree that in a perfect world, instructors would provide raw
content and expertise to instructional technologists/media developers
who would then use high-powered authoring tools to generate
audiovisually rich, interactive learning objects.  However, amongst the
various institutions that I've worked for, there has never been near
enough instructional design support to meet the demand. The best working
model I've seen thusfar is our own, in which we conduct periodic
workshops to train faculty in the use of authoring tools, and follow up
with technical support and supplemental training. 

I do indeed plan to further explore the Xerte Online Toolkits to see how
they might fit into our model, particulary if this online tool is
template-driven. In my opinin, liberal use of templates and wizards is
largely the reason why PowerPoint became such an ubiquitous presentation
tool in the first place(that is, aside from Microsoft's relentless
determination to destroy all its competition).  But most of our faculty
have developed a reluctance to use online authoring environments because
of the issues of network latency/lag when dealing with online
applications.  There is a preference for desktop applications when at
all possible. For example, while our institution uses BlackBoard for its
LMS, most of our faculty use Respondus to author blackboard-delivered
exams and surveys, because it speeds the process enormously.

	>The other point about WYSIWYG which we've discussed in the past
is that it might compromise some of the accessibility benefits - for
example if the tutor chose yellow text in the WYSIWYG but the learner
selected a yellow background all the text would be invisible. Error
trapping that would be somewhat difficult.

Actually, my interest in this stems from having served both as a section
508 (web accessbility) trainer and as an adaptive/assistive technology
specialist for a college disabilities center.  I strongly agree that
preserving the accessibility of Xerte (which is perhaps the most
accessible online learning infrastructure I've yet seen) is a major
priority. But while I certainly understand that building error
trapping/alerting into WYSIWYG authoring would be challenging, I do
think its feasible, and something that such tools will implement more
and more, as we move into the future.

=== Regarding the open source license question

	>The project is completely open source -do whatever you like
with it. If you or others want to develop a new editor for the .rlo
format, that would be great, and something I'd be keen to support

This raises an intriguing question.  Our institution recently launched a
small business technology incubator and our administration is strongly
encouraging faculty and staff (particularly those with strong software
development experience) to bring forward innovative projects for
consideration.  So this leads me to wonder whether it would be within
the parameters of the open source license to develop an alternate
Xerte-based editor that might eventually be marketed commercially? 

Well, covered a good bit of ground with these posts.  Again, I greatly
appreciate all your terrific feedback and look forward to any further
comments.

Much thanks.

Chris

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 6:16 AM, Alistair McNaught
<Alistair.McNaught at heacademy.ac.uk> wrote:

Agreed there is not one tool, but there's not one tension either; the
other tension is between developing interactivities that have been
thought through with a range of user needs in mind compared with those
that are implemented without accessibility consideration.

Whilst there is often an argument to be made for intelligent and
strategic 'partial accessibility' (ie we add a lot of value for these
learners even if we reduce it for those learners - who we will support
in a that different way) most partially accessible learning resources in
institutions owe more to ignorance of the issues than strategic
compromise for learner benefits.  Much of the benefit of Xerte Toolkits
is that there is a pedigree of accessibility awareness. Helping people
value and nurture that inheritance is an important part of developing
distinctive quality.

A

From: xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
[mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Julian Tenney
Sent: 02 February 2010 10:57

To: Xerte discussion list
Subject: RE: [Xerte] Questions about Templates Error, WYSIWYG, Open
Source license,

The interesting debate is around the tension between powerful flexible
tools that can do anything you need to, and tools that anyone can use,
with very little learning curve. I don't think there is the 'one' tool.

From: xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
[mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Alistair
McNaught
Sent: Tuesday, February 02, 2010 10:54 AM
To: Xerte discussion list
Subject: RE: [Xerte] Questions about Templates Error, WYSIWYG, Open
Source license,

The other point about WYSIWYG which we've discussed in the past is that
it might compromise some of the accessibility benefits - for example if
the tutor chose yellow text in the WYSIWYG but the learner selected a
yellow background all the text would be invisible. Error trapping that
would be somewhat difficult.

Alistair

From: xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
[mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Julian Tenney
Sent: 02 February 2010 10:06
To: Xerte discussion list
Subject: RE: [Xerte] Questions about Templates Error, WYSIWYG, Open
Source license,

HI,

Thanks for the questions.

Which templates are causing you problems when you try and install them?
What happens exactly?

The WYSIWYG editor would be great, but is quite an undertaking: and
there is some debate over whether it would actually simplify things -
also some types of icon don't have visual elements on the screen, so how
to select and adjust properties of those? There is some WYSIWYG via
shift-F5.

The project is completely open source -do whatever you like with it. If
you or others want to develop a new editor for the .rlo format, that
would be great, and something I'd be keen to support - but I cannot do
it alone. The current work on Xerte 3.0 might present an opportunity to
add the WYSIWYG stuff, as the codebase for that is much more object
oriented and modular, and easier to work with  - remember, Xerte 2.x
began life in 2004 as a Flash 6 swf, in the days before any proper
object-oriented support in Flash. Xerte 3.0 is built on the Flex
framework, and is all ActionScript 3.0, so it's right up to date, and
there is loads of potential. I'm very keen to encourage a developer
community around it.

Who do you mean by instructors? Academics at your institution? I don't
think that even a WYSIWYG editor will get them doing what is essentially
programming, and they will need some skills with scripting. Here, our
academics use Xerte Online Toolkits to create content from templates,
and they manage quite well - you might want to explore that more. I
don't think there is a holy grail, and I have searched hard for it too -
I think the answer is in a suite of tools that compliment each other,

Regards,

J

From: xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
[mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Christopher
King
Sent: Monday, February 01, 2010 10:34 PM
To: xerte at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
Subject: [Xerte] Questions about Templates Error, WYSIWYG, Open Source
license,

Hello,

I've came across Xerte fairly recently and have only just begun to
experiment with its  capabilities for authoring learning objects. 

Coming from a background in instructional design, I've worked with quite
a variety of commercial e-learning authoring tools over the years,
including Flash, Lectora, Softchalk, Articulate and many others.
However, I've always felt these commercial offerings had  shortcomings
that ultimately made them very unlikely to be really see much use by the
majority of instructors in academia.  Typically, these elearning
authoring tools either have too steep a learning curve for teachers who
have very little time to spare, or that they are far too expensive to be
feasible for a departmental budget, or both.

So for many years, I've made it a point to search for this "holy grail"
of e-learning tools. As I searched, I added to my wish list that the
idea tool would be XML based, able to export to its content in swf
format, and create content that was 508 accessible. Thus, I was
extremely excited to discover Xerte and to learn that this platform is
free and open source, based in XML and creates highly accessible
content.

However, as I've begun to delve into making my first learning objects
with the Xerte standalone tool, I'm running into some early challenges
getting comfortable with the authoring workflow and with getting things
to work right.

For example, I've tried to take advantage of some of the pre-built
templates, but when I try to install a template, I get an "Invalid File
Format" error prompt.  I've tried this in two different versions of
Xerte, including the latest, but no luck.  I would really like to try
these out so wondering if anyone might have a suggestion.

I'm also concerned that not having a WYSIWYG authoring environment will
likely be a show-stopper for many instructors.  Is there any plan to
have such an interface enhancement added to future versions?

Also, I'm curious to know to what extent this tool is Open source.
Obviously, it is free, but is the source code also available for other
developers to modify to create their own customized versions?  If
modification of the code is permissable, my institution has some fairly
robust programming talent which might be utilized to enhance aspects of
the authoring infrastructure, such as adding a WYSIWIG editing
component.

I hope these questions aren't out of place in this forum, as I would
greatly any feedback offered.

Much thanks.

Chris King

University of South Florida Polytechnic

Lakeland, FL USA

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