To begin at the beginning, as someone once said….Xerte is a suite of tools designed (at the University of Nottingham)to allow you to rapidly create online learning objects. Without writing any fancy code you can use Xerte to integrate text, graphics, animations, sounds and video, create simple interactivity, and deliver it in an accessible interface. Content can be SCORM compliant for delivery in any LMS or VLE. The other excellent news is that Xerte is open-source, or in other words available to download at no cost. Click here for a fuller introduction to Xerte in PDF format.
Now as if all of that wasn’t enough the development team have integrated a repository into the Xerte package, a repository being a location where learning objects (everything from a small chunk of text to a piece of video to a full learning sequence) can be stored, catalogued and therefore reused.
The XPERT (Xerte Public E-learning ReposiTory) project is a JISC-funded rapid innovation project (summer 2009) to explore the potential of delivering and supporting a distributed repository of e-learning resources created and seamlessly published through the open source e-learning development tool called Xerte Online Toolkits. The aim of XPERT is to progress the vision of a distributed architecture of e-learning resources for sharing and re-use. (In simple terms: we can all create materials and share them at the same time.) For much more information explore the links in this short piece and take a moment to have a look at the short video below which gives a pretty fair overview of the potential of Xerte and the Xpert repository.
