CollaborativeAuthoring

Introduction

Early adopters of eXe have expressed the need to work collaboratively on e-learning resources. The purpose of this wiki node is to identify user needs and to brainstorm technical solutions to facilitate collaborative work on eXe packages.

Needs

Please describe how you would like to use eXe in collaborative authoring situations here ...

Project: Online Physics Tutorials

Place: Dept. of Physics, University of Auckland

People: Rob Kruhlak (r.kruhlak@…), Frederique Vanholsbeeck (f.vanholsbeeck@…)

The pilot project involves our Physics for Life Sciences course. There are four main topics in the course: Mechanics, Thermal Physics, Electricity, and Optics & Waves.

There is one lecturer for each topic. Thus we see the need to merge at least four .elp files to create a unified course website or scorm export. We may need to merge more than four files if we hire student developers to help with specific topic areas.

Thus our immediate need is for a basic import function that would concatenate an .elp with an open (current .elp) file.

In the future we may find it useful to be able to import specific parts or compare two documents (.elp files) and take the latest work from each.

Ideas with regards to a basic import function that concatentates an .elp with an open (current .elp) file. One method would be to chop off the root node of the imported .elp file and update all the "identities" of the imported nodes such that they get inserted into the next node below the root.

RJK

Project: Professional development modules for "Effective use of eleraning with Maori learners"

Project Manager: (terryn@…) Instructional Designer: (kate.hunt@…)

Project is to develop course material that can be used any institution in any LMS

Issue 1: Development by writers/instructional designers in different geographical locations. Files need to be adapted by members of the team. At present, if Person A develops an i-device, Person B cannot use it in another file. We need to be able to copy i-devices from one .elp file to another -- at present they can only be moved.

Issue 2: Tutors working in a team with ID advice, or tutors who are building separate parts of a common programme. It would be useful to be able to 'set' a list of i-devices to be used, and to eliminate (or turn off) the others. The more i-devices are available, the greater the risk of confusion and ineffective use of the tools.

KJH

Brainstorm for technical solutions

There are many ways we could approach making eXe more collaborative.

There seem to be a variety of issues: the first of which seems to be the problem of opening a package that one user receives that contains iDevices that this user does not have in their copy of eXe. Perhaps a way around this might be to either warn the user and then try to download the iDevice automatically. We may need to find a way to include user created iDevices within packages.

Another interesting approach might be to turn eXe back towards the network and focus on collaboration being a networked activity between two users of eXe - a kind of peer-to-peer model. Can we hack eXe to work across the network so that there could possibly be two users who are working on the same content, synching content perhaps, etc. See: Gobby, think incorporating a chat client into eXe? just ideas. -- BrentSimpson DateTime(2006-04-15T09:38:08Z)?