Media Flexibility

One aspect of eXe that we have been eager to improve is how images, audio, and video can be included within a course. R3m0 Williams has been hard at work over the past few releases to improve our rich text editor. When authoring each field of nearly every iDevice you will now see buttons for inserting images, media, and mathematics.(1) This gives you the flexibility to include media wherever it is appropriate, including things like inserting multiple video clips in one activity or putting an image in the feedback. There is no longer any need for special case iDevices that exist only for holding an image or certain type of media.

For example, if you click on the leftmost of the highlighted buttons you are shown a dialog box for selecting the image to embed and the properties of that image. Click on the file browser icon and you can pick an image (JPEG, PNG, GIF) from your local hard disk to be inserted in the field. The dialog box also allows you to set the description (the ALT tag of the image for accessibility) and the title (which many browsers display when hovering the mouse over the image). If you want finer control over image and text layout within the field, you can embed items inside of table cells using the rich text editor.

Old eXe packages that use the Image with Text iDevice are automatically updated to use the Free Text iDevice with the image embedded in it. You can edit that iDevice to change its layout (or even add more images). We plan to deprecate the other media-specific iDevices like Flash Movie, Flash with Text, MP3, and Maths since you can now include all of their features and more within the standard iDevices.


(1) The image button was added in eXe 0.95, the media button in eXe 0.97, and the mathematics button will appear in eXe 0.98 which you can get a sneak preview of by helping to test our nightly builds. Your feedback in our forums is most welcome.

Off to eFest...

Three of the eXe team will be descending on Wellington this week for eFest 2007, the big national gathering of teachers, course designers, policy makers, and technologists in the field of e-Learning. We are excited by the reaction we've had to eXe lately and look forward to talking with some of the users face-to-face to get more feedback.

We've released Version 0.95 of eXe today. The big version number jump is intended to suggest that we've implemented most of the key features that we have planned for this part of project. Over the next month or two we plan to refine the framework, polish the user experience, and continue to improve the stability of the editor. (And if you or someone at your institution wants to get involved with eXe development, customization, or translation, now is the ideal time.)

And speaking of the new version, in addition to the usual number of bug fixes and tweaks is a significant new feature: you can now embed images in arbitrary fields of the standard iDevices. This not only improves the authoring flexibility, it allows you to use images within the pedagogical templates the iDevices provide rather than having to treat the images as a special case.

So if you see some seedy guys handing out CDs of the "Pre Release" eXe and showing off text course content on an iPod at eFest, stop by and say "Hi" (or "Why...").

Removing iDevices from eXe

Users can now remove unwanted iDevices from the iDevice pane of their version of eXe by modifying the exe.conf file that comes with eXe. exe.conf is a text file that is used by eXe to configure many of the settings required to run the program. On Windows it can usually be found at C:\\Documents and Settings\YOURUSERNAME\Application Data\exe\exe.conf.


You can edit this file using Notepad on your system.


iDevices are specified by their English name (including spaces, if any). Setting an idevice to 0 or off will cause it not to show up in the iDevice pane. Add an [idevices] section to your exe.conf file and designate what iDevices you wish to remove by adding the name of the iDevice and either a "0" or the word "off" next to the name, like this:


[idevices]
Activity = 0
Case Study = off
Flash with Text = Off
Cloze Activity = On # this one would still appear


Save exe.conf and restart eXe.

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.