eXe for Mobile Content

One of the areas we are exploring is making educational resources available in a variety of formats, including mobile content delivery. In the 0.23 release of eXe, we've added a prototype of an export function that writes the Notes format used by the Apple iPod. There are several limitations imposed by this format, including being restricted to unstyled text, a strict page size limit, and a design that makes it difficult to include images/audio. However even with these severe limitations, certain types of read only resources are still usable and are now very portable.

The File... Export... iPod Notes menu item prompts for a folder to be used for the export. Within that folder, it creates a new folder with the current eXe package name that contains the table of contents and all of the pages. Simply copy that new folder to the Notes directory of an iPod to make the resource available on the go.

Tags: eLearning XHTML editor

Adding a CC License to your eXe content

A new eXe has been released today, version 0.21. One of the relatively new features of eXe is the ability to easily add a range of Creative Commons licenses to your published content.

To add a license switch to the Properties pane by clicking on the Properties tab above the authoring space. Select the license you wish to add by using the dropdown menu. Be sure to clickon the "Done" button before returning to the Authoring pane or your additions will not be saved.

Click for larger image.

The license will be added to the bottom of your content when you export. A link will be provided to the actual online version of the license.

eXe 0.20 released

It has been a long couple of months since our last official release. Since not everyone is daring enough to try the nightly builds, we needed a new release to get some of the many new features and dozens of bug fixes out to the user community. We backed out one particularly invasive change and allowed a few days for testing and tweaking.

Among the new features in version 0.20:

• added Geogebra option to the Java iDevice plugin
• optional footer on all pages of your project
  
• dramatically improved loading speed for some complex .elp packages
• backup crash recovery scheme
• clearer iDevice editor user interface
• first pass at SCORM2004 export
  

There have also been dozens of bug fixes and work arounds added.

While we still have a few significant features on our roadmap before reaching the mythical version 1.0, we will be working hard to stabilize the application and fix outstanding issues. We will try to release more frequently so that the user community can take advantage of this (and point out things that still need work).

We welcome feedback in the Eduforge eXe forums. Or if you run into a bug, you can report it in our issue tracker. Please search to see if someone else has already reported the problem, and if so add any clarifications that you can to their "ticket" to make it easier for us to reproduce the issue. You can add new tickets, but please be sure to give us information about the exact version of eXe and the operating system you are using along with any steps (or sample files) necessary to duplicate the problem.

We are also trying to make the project more accessible to developers. We've improved the instructions for tracking down the prerequisites and building from source, and we've also added some scripts that automate the build process. This will be an ongoing effort as we make eXe more customizable and the project more sustainable.

Not for the feint of heart

The eXe team is now automating eXe builds and will be regularly releasing some experimental builds of the editor. These versions are not recommended for normal usage but they may fix some of the known bugs (... or introduce new ones!!!). If this is not for you then please visit the Eduforge download page to get the officially released and stable packages.

If you do decide to help test these packages, and we hope that some of you can, then feedback is most welcome! If you have problems, please be sure to let us know by either emailing us or using our ticket tracker, being sure to specify the (pre)release and revision number of the package you are using.

You can access the experimental builds here: http://exelearning.org/files/nightlies/

(photo - author: klareralt License: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0)

Interview with Wayne Mackintosh

Wayne Mackintosh has been interviewed by the Penn State World Campus blog Terra Incognita. Penn State World Campus delivers more than 50 distance education programs to learners around the world, and has been delivering distance education programs for over a century.

Wayne's original vision with eXe was always motivated by a strong desire to provide a tool that could be used in low bandwidth communities, particularly in developing societies, and to enable teachers to author content that could be easily shared and contextualized for different cultural contexts.

As Wayne states in the interview:

"The lack of financial resources, limited infrastructure and exorbitant connectivity costs amplify the resolve of the free software and free content community working in the developing world. For example, the total cost of ownership of free software (which includes the support and maintenance costs) are lower than their non-free equivalents. The implementation of free software solutions promotes growth of local business and local income generation for support services rather than relying on expensive offshore alternatives."

Read the full article, here: Interview with upcoming presenter Wayne Mackintosh