The Biodiversity Consortium Blog

Personally, I find eXe fairly easy to work with, which makes a change with these things! I did use to use Dreamweaver, but realised that coding directly in html was the only way to get round Dreamweaver’s ‘IE friendly, everything else unfriendly’ coding, particularly given the rise in importance of Firefox! Basically, Dreamweaver always put in too much ‘Dreamweaver speak’ that nothing else other than IE recognised, and for Firefox you had to get rid of some of this ‘advanced coding’ in order for it to work elsewhere. eXe doesn’t do this, although, inevitably, it has its own little nuances (see below).

The following two are rather equivocal in terms of people’s judgement (with two schools of thought). Personally, I am against the first (use of SCORM) and in favour of the second (use of more advanced javascripting, where appropriate), given that most VLEs cater for these anyway.

• It does enable the use of SCORM packaging, although that has major downsides which, for educational resources I strongly do not recommend, particularly if those resources are supposed to act independently of a VLE (for instance, SCORM produces a manifest, rather than including the menu within the materials, which is problematic if you have a number of different topics being explored as a subject entity, which is the usual case with e-learning: it can be done the other way, but it is time-consuming, and time is something no-one has these days). Therefore, our materials are not being made SCORM-ready or even SCORM-compliant at this stage (although we can provide such very easily);
• Although a certain level of javascript can be incorporated, more advanced javascripting, for instance internal popup windows (which are compliant with accessibility) must be included once the material is published, which is fine if you have the html know-how to be able to copy and paste certain coding-phrases.

a. Advantages:-

1. eXe is allowing rapid conversion of material from the original materials (script sheets for the scholar’s desktop, + images) into a single entity package that can have one to many learning topics, all accessible through a menu, or internal to, and as hyperlinking between,  the course material pages (SCORM won’t properly allow the latter, which is one of my major problems with it as this hyperlinking systemology is a fundamental of the WWW);
2. Problems in layout within any of the original materials can be ‘tinkered with’ very easily within eXe once templates have been set up.
3. eXe takes away the problem of ‘which media player do I use’, and, once you state what the original is, will automatically choose the player for you.
4. Like Dreamweaver, eXe facilitates wysiwyg editing, including the provision of ‘automatic markup’, which can then itself be edited within the eXe editor (by clicking on ‘html’). It therefore allows for a collaborative development between a subject specialist (e.g. an ecologist, such as me) and a technically-minded coding specialist (um, like me), as well as someone who specialises in online pedagogy (sigh, like me, OK ……), with each being able to contribute directly to the material, even when not in face-to-face contact (sometimes like me, maybe!). It enables rapid editing changes to take place at a variety of levels (unlike normal Dreamweaver, although it is sort-of possible);
5. eXe is free (unlike Dreamweaver or that other so-called ‘editor’ called Adobe Contribute, which I really do not like);
6. Once created in eXe, it is amazingly simple to create either larger versions of material, e.g. by joining two tutorials together, or smaller versions, by packaging elements of a large tutorial into smaller ‘templates’. Every time, you do not need to worry about the menu, as this updates automatically (menu creation is a major bug-bear in any e-learning development usually);
7. Given that all eXe creates at the end of the day is a set of web pages that are interlinked and menu-navigable, editing outside of eXe is simple – you need no proprietary software for it (except for a wysiwyg editor if you aren’t au fait with the html: not a problem in our case);
8. Any outside source can be included in eXe. It’s the browser that becomes restrictive, not the eXe editor or its resultant webpages;
9. In the original scholar’s desktop, we had the facility to enable tutors to add additional news to materials. It was difficult to create such a facility within Dreamweaver that would make sense, but we can do this in eXe fairly easily, although you still have some of the constraints.

b. Disadvantages:-

1. Templates are slightly problematic. I use a ‘ready to run version’, and have created template css files which I then use to replace the css files created by the eXe publication facility. As long as I remember that the editor is using a different set of cascading style sheets to the final ones, I have absolutely no problem. I suspect this may in fact be due to my limitations in terms of creating a personalised version of an eXe ready to run. The version I am using was created inhouse from a full download of eXe, so it would be possible to create this, but with a bit more technical know-how than I have.  However, there are ways around this, as I have suggested;
2. I have been in communication with members of the BERLIN project, who find the notification wording on the sound file tool a bit annoying (it states ‘no sourcefile available’, although this is untrue – possibly not available until you click the control, at which point it suddenly IS available). Admittedly, the person who pointed this out was an economics specialist, and none of the students or tutors I have interacted with even noticed this feature until it was pointed out to them, at which point the response was ‘well, if it’s there, I’m gonna click on it anyway’;
3. If you want anything more advanced than the basic eXe format, then you do have to code this yourself. This may become more important as e-learning materials development matures, but then, so will the developers involved become more specialised;
4. One particularly annoying feature I have found with eXe is that I do have to tidy up the code a little, particularly if mistakes are made in the initial wysiwyg editor: eXe doesn’t always clean out the additional coding. In a select example, we also have problem with a specialised template that we have created (i.e. an ‘information box div’), where eXe shows that it doesn’t completely differentiate between a paragraph break (a simple return press) and a line break (which is shift return). In eXe it will create separate boxes for each return, which is a bit annoying: our solution – use a double line break, or bullet point material within the box (although there is a secondary problem with bullet points if you want to space them out a bit). Although lengthy to describe, it’s a pretty trivial complaint!
5. As yet, I haven’t worked out how to get new idevices created, although I suspect that you need the full version of eXe to do this.

We do feel that this sort of presentation is really only useful for ‘freely-offered material’.  If we were to create the fully enhanced versions, then we still need something far more advanced in its technical development abilities than anything currently out there.  We do mourn the loss of our Scholar’s Desktop!