OER1004 Demonstration ppt

Xerte Online Toolkits and the Xpert Repository

Julian Tenney, University of Nottingham

Conference Themes: Open Educational Content, Open Educational Communities

Intended audience: Content Developers, OER Repository developers, elearning managers, interactive designers

Abstract: Web 2.0 is creating new opportunities for creating, reusing and managing content, and has led to the development of Xerte Online Toolkits at the University of Nottingham. Xerte Online Toolkits is open-source software and is in use all over the world. The University of Nottingham is working to progress the vision of a distributed architecture for the development of interactive learning content and the submission of that content into open access repositories. The demonstration will show how recent developments to the Xerte suite of tools are allowing several partner institutions to jointly produce content for publication in the open-access Xpert repository, and show how many of the issues involved in the creation, distribution and re-use of open access resources are being identified and addressed. Xerte Online Toolkits is a suite of open-source browser-based tools that allow content developers to develop rich, interactive and highly accessible content quickly and easily and to seamlessly publish that content online. Collaboration with other content developers is supported and it is easy to share and re-use content with other users. The system is extensible by developers and provides a proven, flexible and powerful solution. Recent developments add to this by making it easy to add metadata to the learning resources and to expose learning resources for harvesting by open-access repositories using RSS carrying Dublin Core metadata. Crucially, resources remain with the institution that developed them, removing many of the barriers to repository use that other initiatives have encountered when requiring that the content itself be submitted. The demonstration will highlight the benefits of a distributed repository over more traditional models and demonstrate how Web 2.0 techniques are adding value. We will also show how we enable content to be easily adapted, re-purposed and re-used and discuss some of the issues we have encountered. Building on the work done with a number of partner institutions, we will explore a range of cultural, technological and organisational issues associated with developing open-access content in general and the adoption of such a system in particular.

References/URL: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xerte