You may have seen via various channels that Xerte 3 is now out of beta and officially available for production use. You may also have read about some of the new features and/or seen the release notes and/or seen the video embedded below.  But simply put:

This is a must-have Xerte upgrade and obviously it’s free and open source so isn’t subject to the licence costs often attached to upgrading commercial software.

First a quick animated video snapshot of some of the benefits before further comment:

Those of us who have been developing this release and testing and using it at the same time over a period of months have all echoed the same reflection:

Once you’ve used this Xerte version you’ll find the old version, if you still have to use it for some reason, very frustrating!

Now obviously Xerte has been very popular, effective, flexible and powerful even before this release but the new WYSIWYG editor in particular, but also some of the other new affordances potentially at least bring this to a whole new level!

The official release notes outline some of the new features and benefits but until you use it for yourself it might seem like some of these new features are minimal improvements. Indeed some are very simple, although very useful, tweaks and as always we have listened to community feedback, responded to common requests and along the way added some brand new features too. The point to remember here is that our core values remain the same:

1. To maintain the ease of use – for anyone and everyone yet also providing a powerful tool for developers
2. To maintain the high level of built-in accessibility – for everyone not just for screen reader users
3. To continue to foster and support a positive community – which as you may know is mature and well established and growing all the time

Despite all this I often find that those with a learning technologist role, or specialist developer role, or similar variation, can sometimes be a barrier to wider Xerte adoption. The point is if you have the time and expertise there are a myriad of other free and commercial authoring tools you can use as part of your workflow and toolkit, (I use them too)  but it doesn’t have to be either/or – you can use Xerte together with those other tools. More importantly what about everyone else in your organisation?

Where Xerte really plays it’s part is as an authoring tool for everyone – for all staff and all students! That’s simply not viable with most, if not all, of the commercial tools currently popular in some organisations.

Here’s a Pecha Kucha presentation that I used at an East Midlands Learning Technologists Group meeting recently that expands on this key message further. Play the audio on the first page and the presentation should self-run and self-navigate:

…

Summary

The info and resources linked above should make the benefits of this new bigger and better Xerte very clear, but to summarise:

This really is a must-have upgrade!

If you already use Xerte you should be banging on the door of whoever looks after your installation and prompting them to upgrade.

If you don’t currently use Xerte or have explored and dismissed it previously – now is the time to look again and to really look on behalf of the staff and learners you work with too!

Suffice to say if you’re interested in any kind of Xerte support there is free support via our various community channels and there is direct consultancy support available too! 😉

Partly in preparation for a CPD webinar about Xerte for the Learning Futures programme but also for use during other sessions and conferences I put together the video below providing an overview of the Xerte story so far…

Time flies and the 2014 festive season has been and gone and because it was late in December when these training resources were completed and released by Jisc Legal I don’t think the resources have been as widely publicised as they might have been. So I thought it would be a good idea to help publicise the free training resources and also add some additional info and context not covered elsewhere.

Firstly it was a pleasure to support the Jisc Legal team in the development of these resources and I think great testament to their dedication in working so hard on this amidst all the JISC restructuring etc. The free training for both FE and HE staff is available for previewing via the links below but also available for download from Jorum too (whilst Jorum is still available) in both standard zip and SCORM formats.

View Data Protection for University Staff | Download SCORM

View Data Protection for College Staff | Download SCORM

Self-access and Flipped CPD

With all the talk about flipped classroom and flipped learning in recent months and years I thought it would be useful to add some comments about how I think these resources might be used for self-access and/or perhaps ‘flipped CPD’. Forgetting the hype involved in all the flipped learning talk (and apologies for referring to flipped CPD too) importantly I’d like to comment on how I think these resources might be used together with f2f training, or perhaps other online guidance, to not only facilitate understanding but ideally inform and achieve change in behaviour too.

If you access the materials you’ll read and hear that data protecton training is regarded as a requirement now and as such you might conclude that by working through the materials yourself, or making them available to colleagues if that’s your role, ticks the boxes regarding that requirement. I guess that type of access/use falls into the category of what is often referred to as ‘compliance training’ and by adding the SCORM versions to your vle you can track completion and evidence who has accessed the training. A lot of time and effort by the Jisc legal team was put into making this training practical, clear and concise and directly relevant to staff working in Colleges and Universities. Hopefully the resulting material is engaging and makes it easy to understand the key messages about data protection considerations and requirements through a series of directly relevant scenarios. So in this respect I think it’s reasonable to expect anyone working through the material to gain a reasonable understanding of the key topics covered. Boxes ticked!

However will that increased awareness and understanding result in change in behaviour or indeed change in organisational policy and strategy too. A change in policy/strategy isn’t really a specific objective of the training but clearly increased understanding should ideally result in fewer occurrences of breaches of data protection or at least improved decision making and practice and to change or support that arguably might require assessment of, if not change in, policy, strategy or appropriate resource provision. As a simple example one of the scenarios talks about a member of staff with good intentions taking personal data home on both an encrypted laptop and a usb stick and the guidance talks about minimising risk and only using the encrypted laptop. All makes sense and easy to follow and understand. However what if there aren’t any encrypted laptops available? Or what if some members of staff are unaware of how to use such an encryption system and need support at that particular point in time to be able to do so? Is the local guidance and access to policies, procedures and relevant resources available to match the theory to reality and to compliment the messages provided by the training? This is just one simple example and obviously not any kind of criticism of the training material but in my experience I do think additional online support and guidance and possibly even f2f training might also be required if the self-access training is to result in a real and sustained change in behaviour and to make that change possible.

The training provides opportunity throughout to make reflective notes and to print or email those notes at the end. If your role is to provide and support this training and to promote and support good practice in terms of data protection I would encourage you to make notes about wherever additional local guidance, resources or other changes in provision and support might be required to help facilitate what ideally should be change in behaviour as well as just increased understanding.

Common Craft & Common Craft Style

If you’re familiar with the work of Common Craft  and Common Craft Style animations and explainer videos you might notice some clear similarities with the scenarios and style used in this data protection material. I subscribe to use the Common Craft cut-out library but also over the years have built up my own original cut-outs in similar style where the library doesn’t include exactly what I need e.g. like the UK police image shown here.

I can heartily recommend their Art of Explanation book and as an organisation you might also find it useful to subscribe to some or all of their excellent video library. More importantly establishing Common Craft style projects with your students can be a very engaging and productive T&L strategy. A search for “Common Craft style” should result in lots of examples of others dong this as well as various tutorials.

I hope you find the data protection materials and these additional comments useful!

I’ve had the pleasure of working with the Jisc Legal team recently to update their copyright training for University Lecturers in light of new legislation and also to create a new and updated copy aimed at College Lecturers. You can preview both the HE and FE versions via the links below and also access the modules on Jorum (whilst it’s still available) where you can download plain or SCORM versions of the resource for uploading to your VLE/LMS.

View Copyright Training for College Lecturers* | Download from Jorum | Download updated SCORM* | Download updated non-SCORM* 

View Copyright Training for University Lecturers* | Download from Jorum | Download updated SCORM* | Download updated non-SCORM* 

*Minor updates Aug 2016

Now that the version for college lecturers is available I used the resource as part of a training session last week as a vehicle for discussing a few separate topics:

1. Copyright considerations
The training resource contains very pragmatic advice and guidance which is much needed in an area which is often complex and as a consequence often completely ignored!

2. An example of scenario based e-learning content
These days it is well known amongst professional developers just how effective scenario based e-learning can be especially when compared with the old tell test metaphor that was the norm previously. Arguably this Jisc legal training could go further in this respect but there’s obviously a balance to be had when the training is aimed at ‘short of time’ lecturers and self-contained access with 60 minutes or less completion time. There are opportunities for reflection and note taking throughout and although some of the individual topics seem very similar and possibly repetitive it’s these individual notes and reflections and the ability to email or print the collated results that could prove the difference between the informational and performance objectives underpinning the training.

3. An example of mobile compatible content created with a rapid e-learning tool
Many visitors here will be familiar with my involvement with Xerte but in this case Articulate Storyline was the tool of choice. This was for a number of reasons, not least of which updating the previous module created with Articulate Presenter, but also some of the improvements and additions in this case would have been difficult and more time consuming to start from scratch in Xerte. With the latest version of Articulate Storyline there are apps for use on iPads and Android tablets providing optimised access on those devices as well as HTML 5 and Flash output for other platforms. As well as optimised playback an additional benefit of using the free Articulate app on your iPad or Android tablet is the option to download to your device for offline use e.g. download while on institution wifi and then learn from the material while on the move without needing a connection.

4. Finished content showing the result of a mix of tools and techniques
It seems to me that too often there is a notion that one size/tool fits all e.g. a single authoring tool will provide all that is required. Apart from the fact that it’s not the tool that creates effective learning content but the planning, authoring skills and learning design that goes into the development, it’s rarely the case that a single tool will suffice these days. When I think about the array of tools and techniques used in developing this material the list is almost endless including PowerPoint, Photoshop, Articulate Presenter, Articulate Storyline, Audacity, VideoScribe, Inkscape, Google Drive, DropBox, Trello, Word, FormatFactory etc etc etc.

It was useful to be able to discuss some of this in the context of a real world example during a training session that wasn’t really about copyright but quickly highlighted how much this role based and pragmatic guidance about copyright is certainly needed!

Xerte SCORM what are the considerations?

What are the pros and cons of Xerte SCORM?

What are the steps to export as SCORM?

Click the image above to view a guide and interactive scenario.