This page contains the minutes from User Group meetings.
Friday 15th July, 2005
AUT (Andrew Higgens), OP (Sue Dark); Christchurch College of Education /CTA (Derek Chirnside);; ITPNZ (Terry Neal); Massey University (Duncan O’Hara); Wintec (John Clayton & Dean Hutt); University of Waikato (Chris Knowles & Paul Haley); Te Wananga O Aotearoa (Richard Jones); New Zealand College of Massage (Karen Malone); Te Wananga O Raukawa (Tom Winitana); Whitireia Community Polytechnic (Kate Hunt); University of Auckland (Rob Kruhlak – Physics, Cherry Hsu- Goodfellow Unit) eXe Project Team (Wayne Mackintosh, Jenny Lin, Matthew Sherborne, Helena Mill);
Project Progress
Summary of features from releases 0.7 to 0.9 Much of the discussion surrounding these releases was around possible user interface and feature enhancement. Issues raised have been logged in the project issue tracker http://exelearning.org/mantis/view_all_bug_page.php
General discussion
There was some over the possible advantages of using XML. There appears to be some interest in XML amongst the group. The ability to move from one elp file to another the group considered to be a show stopper for users. Mathew is in the process of writing a green paper concerning this.
Rob Kruhlak provide a brief commentary on his project. rob is using eXe to link from content (developed in eXe) to the Oasis assessment engine where students can complete an assessment before linking back into the eXe developed learning content.
Terry Neil spoke briefly about e-Maori project. The use of eXe in this project raised issues around collaborative team work environments with team members editing content that formed part of a larger content package. Terry also talked briefly about the graphic design work that was commissioned for the project which included interpretive descriptions of the icons produced.
There was general discussion around iDevices and templates. Much of the discussion focused on how we were defining a template. The group felt that although there appeared to be a need for some template models, the users should be left to determine what made a useful template for their specific application. The idea of producing a wizard to create templates was suggested. However the overall feeling of the group was that templates were a nice to have feature rather then a need to have.
The group was keen that for future releases the focus should be on ensuring the stability of the application in every reasonable way and ensuring that usability encompass the technical abilities of those users with limited technical experience.
The group have requested that an update email be sent out 3-4 weekly to prompt them into any action or feedback required by the development team.
Comments
David Moore and myself have just finished attending the Open Source in Education conference in the Netherlands where we presented a workshop on eXe. This is the third workshop that i have conducted on using eXe. One of the unique advantages of presenting a workshop like this is that I get to see firsthand how people use eXe and I treat them as a kind of impromptu usability test. My personal feelings in relation to what the group has discussed at this last meeting are that they are quite right: templates are not something that we should be spending a lot of time on; they will increase the complexity immensely, take a lot of effort to code and I while they are a good idea, my instinct is that they are not quite what users want. My feelings are that we should on this last stretch so to speak focus on constantly improving usability and seriously looking at how we can facilitate collaboration. I think that we should redo the survey form to try to capture more specific usability problems. The current form does little to capture any useful information in this regard. Anyways.... we have had a great time at the conference and must say that there is some real interest in the project here in the Nethelands and in Europe. I expect that we may get some real hacking done on the project soon from europe. More details when I return. -- BrentSimpson DateTime(2005-11-16T05:19:25Z)?