It’s been on my list of tools to have a look at for a long time, and at last today I had a window of opportunity to have a first play around with eXe. And it was well worth it!
eXe is an Open Source authoring application designed to be easy for academics and others without technical web skills to use. Resources authored in eXe can be exported as IMS Content Packages or SCORM 1.2, amongst other formats, and imported into VLEs such as Moodle.
You can download it for free from http://exelearning.org/Download .
The thing I most liked about it is the way that it encourages you to take a structured activity-based approach to creating resources, a bit like Moodle in some ways but with more scaffolding.
Learning packages created in eXe are structured in pages, to which you can add a range of iDevices. Different types of content can be added through the iDevice menu, for example websites, quiz questions, RSS feeds, cloze exercises, images and a range of structured activities.
For my first page I chose the “reading activity”. This gives a built-in structure with headings: what to read, activity and feedback. Later I looked at the “case study” activity which prompts you to add the “story”, followed by an activity and feedback.
Other features which were appealing were:
- You can easily re-size sections e.g. choices in MCQ question.
- You can embed LaTeX.
- It is easy to re-order pages.
- You can embed entire webpages and wikipedia articles.
- It is easy to combine or sequence activities and move things around within and between pages.
- The layout and style are clean, attractive and professional.
A couple of initial problems I had were:
- You are supposed to be able to embed Youtube videos , but I couldn’t get this to work.
- Unfortunately there doesn’t yet appear to be any matching type exercise.
However these are small minor issues. Overall eXe appears to be a relatively easy-to-use tool with great potential, and which offers considerably more functionality than alternatives such as Wimba Create.
For an introductory video see:
Filed under: e-learning design | Tagged: authoring, eXe
