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

Tue Feb 2 20:50:03 GMT 2010

I personally feel there is something to be said for the Red Hat/Fedora model.
The source remains open, all the extraneous bits like installers, tech support, documentation etc become a value add proposal.

If only because it frees up the developers to develop, instead of answer the "It won't install on my system" etc. questions. In Xerte's case, I am not fully convinced Julian and Patrick et al are not actually artificial intelligences. Or no rest for the wicked, take your pick.

Of course, until critical distribution mass is reached, it's a moot point.

Dave

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> Date: Tue, 2 Feb 2010 20:06:54 +0000
> From: Julian.Tenney at nottingham.ac.uk
> To: xerte at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
> Subject: RE: [Xerte] Questions about Templates Error, WYSIWYG, Open Source license,
>
>
>
> Much to respond to and think about, but if you take the Xerte source code and develop it, you must make the resulting application open source. That doesn't mean you can't sell it - you can add value through support / documentation/ training and charge for that, but you must release any developments under an open source license.
>
> Toolkits offers you a lot, based on what you say - you should install that and play around.
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk on behalf of Alistair McNaught
> Sent: Tue 02/02/2010 20:00
> To: Xerte discussion list
> Subject: RE: [Xerte] Questions about Templates Error, WYSIWYG, Open Source license,
>
>
> Hi Chris
>
> Your feedback is much appreciated.
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>
>
> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> Alistair
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> 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...
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>
>
> Firstly, let me just thank you both, Julian and Alistair for all the terrific feedback.
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> === Regarding the problems I'm having with the xtp templates...
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> Ok..here is what is happens when I follow the instructions in the "Dynamic Templates with Xerte" document for "Installing a Template Package":
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>
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> The instructions say...
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> To install a template package created by other Xerte users, select ‘Install
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> 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")
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> 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).
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> === Regarding the WYSIWYG authoring interface concept...
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>>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.
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> 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.
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>>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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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>>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.
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> 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.
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>
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> === Regarding the open source license question
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>>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
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>
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> 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?
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> 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.
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>
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> Much thanks.
>
>
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> Chris
>
>
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>
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> On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 6:16 AM, Alistair McNaught> wrote:
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> 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.
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>
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> 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.
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> A
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>
>
> 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?
>
>
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> 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.
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>
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> 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,
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> Regards,
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> J
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>
>
> 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.
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>
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> 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.
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>
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> 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.
>
>
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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?
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>
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> 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.
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> I hope these questions aren't out of place in this forum, as I would greatly any feedback offered.
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> Much thanks.
>
>
>
> Chris King
>
> University of South Florida Polytechnic
>
> Lakeland, FL USA
>
>
>
>
>
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