• By: JimB     Date: 24-01-09
•     Report Abuse

What you're saying here, Remo, is important enough, and expressed succinctly enough, that it strikes me as worthwhile to append a transcript. So, here 'tis. I particularly like your point that too many instructors put a .doc or .pdf file online and say, "poof, now it's e-learning." As you point out, there's so much more to be done with sequencing, interactivity, self-assessment, and multimedia enrichment. eXe is a superbly simple and robust - and free! - tool for making this happen. Thanks for a superb app, Remo and the entire eXe project team!

"eXe really allows you to assemble various assets - multimedia, images, videos, audio files, mp3's, flash animations and so on - to collect various assets or resources and build up a learning object. as a skateboarding instructor, i find that tools help me get my message across to my students. technology has a whole bunch of tools that help me to do that. technology itself may be a big suite of tools.

"eXe is such a tool that can help me get my message across, by creating structured content for my audience. and what i mean by structured content is creating content in a way that is well-organized, well thought-out, and purposefully created for my target audience. What i really like about eXe as a tool to do that is that it's easy. i don't have to spend too much time learning how to use it. the learning curve is probably five minutes to get 80 to 90 percent of its overall functionality and the ideas that are in it. With that ability comes so much power that i as an instructor don't want to concern myself with details such as content packaging - which is absolutely imperative if i want to put my content into various learning management systems, or create a CD to send to another part of the world for somebody to look at offline.

In creating my content, in structuring and organizing my pedagogically sound content - which eXe supports very well - i don't have to concern myself with the details of how to wrap it for an IMS content package - or if this LMS needs a SCORM package, or what about the new Common Cartridges? eXe supports those, to a subset at least, and i don't need to worry about the details that are in it.

"So eXe makes it easy for me to put together well organized, structured, pedagogically sound content, in a way that's easy to do, but also offline. I can go away, work in the mountains for a few weeks, or work in a low-bandwidth area, and create my content, package it up into a CD to send off, or a zip file to send off to a website, and it is that easy to reconnect it once I get back to a network. So its offline capabilities, its easy to use interface, really allows me to think about the content itself.

"I believe a lot of instructors may view e-learning as simply putting a Word file or a PDF file onto the web. Instead of printing it out, It's now on the web, and therefore it's e-learning. And there's so much more to e-learning than that. it's engaging students, pulling them in and allowing them to interact with the content. And to allow them self-assessment tools. Perhaps look at a video and then question their understanding of that video. or engage them in animation - an interactive perhaps Java applet on some physics simulations. Very easily i can assemble and collect these very disparately based resources, pull them in, either as actual content within that package - for example, I can assemble that package with the images, the files, the videos, part of it, bundled up, and then i can ship it off to other teachers, to other institutions, for them to repurpose and recontextualize as necessary. But i can also make a very lightweight package where each image, each video, each multimedia asset, is actually linked to an externally hosted site - which in the networked world is perfect. I can transfer a very lightweight package and everybody can get access to it. but if i don't have that network access, i can pull those assets actually into the content, so it's a heavier package but it's completely portable. and that can go around on CD without any network access at all. I think it's very powerful with eXe.

"eXe is a simple tool that allows me to focus on my passion, for my subject matter and for my students. I don't have to get caught up in the technology. but when there are issues that i'm concerned about, or questions about, I know that there's an international community of eXe users out there. eXe began as a development project in 2004, and so it's got several years of building upon itself, of growing and evolving as a product. It still has some direction to go - no doubt about it. And where it evolves we don't necessarily know yet. But there's thousands of international users out there - many of who've taken eXe and said, "This is so important for our part of the world, for our country, for our region, that we want to help translate this. We want to bring it into our language." So as of now, eXe has at least a couple dozen, 26 or so different languages into which it's been translated. So it's got awesome uptake around the world. so much so, in fact, that some parts of the world have begun distributing it in their open-source software packages for teachers and educators, and just giving it out. I believe that's in the Netherlands, the Ministry of Education, where they hand it out to all their teachers. Other parts of the world are beginning to offer that as support. And the fact that it is open source - the code is available for anybody to modify. It's free, both in the sense of "freedom," and "free beer" - absolutely for anybody to customize the styles, the look and feel, to customize the code within - there's so much power with that. and I know that with the rest of the eXe community, and the forums that are online, and the support that's there from the eXe team, I'm in good hands with eXe."

• By: PaulSeiler     Date: 10-10-08
•     Report Abuse

Well measured, purposeful message. I now want to find some of your skateboard objects to see if the learning is as easy as the listening! Paul