OER1129 Workshop

Wednesday 11 May 13.30 Breakout Room 4/4a

Content creation in an open world: Xerte Online Toolkits and the Xpert repository

Julian Tenney, Steve Stapleton & Patrick Lockley, University of Nottingham

Conference Theme: Academic practice and digital scholarship

Intended audience: All, this is not a technical session

Background & rationale:
Xerte Online Toolkits (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xerte/toolkits.htm) is a powerful suite of browser-based tools allowing anyone with a web browser to log on and create interactive learning materials easily. Xerte Online Toolkits provide a number of project templates for creating online presentations and interactive content. Content is assembled using an intuitive interface and multiple users can collaborate on shared projects. The software is free, open-source and is in use in over 150 institutions around the world with an active community of users and developers. Xerte Online Toolkits are noted for ease of use and highly accessible outputs, and are extensible, allowing new templates to be easily developed to meet particular pedagogical requirements. Xpert (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert) is a repository of open educational learning resources made freely available for sharing and reuse from a variety of institutions around the world. Xpert currently indexes over 150,000 resources, making it one of the world's largest collections of OER. Xerte Online Toolkits make it simple to add content to the Xpert repository so that it can easily be found by others who may want to re-use or re-purpose it. Xpert includes search tools for reusable images, sounds and video for reuse in projects, returning resources properly attributed with the appropriate license information. (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/attribution/). This service makes it easy to confidently find and reuse multimedia assets in projects, and is integrated directly into the Xerte Online Toolkits workflow. Xpert labs (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/labs) is developing innovative new tools and APIs to access the Xpert collection, allowing anyone to develop new applications on top of the collection. This workshop will allow participants to fully explore the suite of tools to create interactive learning materials and publish them to the Xpert repository. Participants will become familiar with creating content with Xerte Online Toolkits and explore the many templates included for creating content. Participants will explore the open publishing process by which Xerte Online Toolkits can publish resources to the Xpert repository, and will gain hands-on experience using Xpert to identify resources for repurposing into new content, and to find and reuse multimedia. Participants will learn more about how the suite of tools is contributing to Open Nottingham, a programme of work designed to facilitate increased use, re-use and publication of OER by staff and students at The University of Nottingham and by the wider community.

Main idea(s) to be explored:
Xerte Online Toolkits and the Xpert repository work together to make it easy to adapt and repurpose existing resources and publish new content into one of the world’s largest collections of OER. Using the tools and insight into their potential the workshop will provide hands-on experience of:

Activities participants will engage in:

Intended outcomes:

Participants will gain a good overview and understanding of the Xerte and Xpert suite of tools.

Keywords: xerte; xpert; metadata; publishing; content creation; oer; reuse; adaptation; rlo; interactivity; accessibility

References/URL:

The Xerte Project http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xerte

Xpert http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert