Along with colleagues at JISC, JISC Techdis, Niace, Learning Unlimited etc I’ve been working on a Maths project developing interactive resources for the past few months and together with another long time colleague Terry Loane we’ve been using a combination of Xerte, Articulate Storyline and other tools to develop the interactive resources in collaboration with the team from Learning Unlimited.

The http://learningmathsonline.ac.uk site has been public for a while now but it’s arguably it’s first official launch at an event today although behind the scenes we are still working on the materials as well as the site and will be for a while yet. One of the things we’ve been looking at together with Alistair McNaught, Shri Footring and Michael Rippon is how best to open the learning objects from the WordPress site from both an accessibility and usability perspective and particularly what the user does when reaching the end of a learning object to return to where they were.

The two links below are a test to demonstrate two possible ways of doing this. The first screenshot link is a standard chromeless pop-up window and the second is a lightbox pop-up. We’ll have to see what works best?…

Opens in a new chromeless window

Opens in a Lightbox window

I delivered a very short Xerte Training session for some Health Science students at Newman University in Birmingham yesterday. (1st Oct 2013)

@BobRidgeStearn tweeted during the session and took the photo opposite. You can view related blog postings via their blog, including a post about what we covered yesterday and a previous post about the project.

Although we also scheduled an afternoon session with some of the staff at Newman, including Bob and some of his team, my main prep was to update some of my existing Xerte LO’s and some new LO’s to provide a wide range of guidance which I could use during the sessions but also which would work as self-access resources after the sessions and for the students in particular. As the student session was so short (and even shorter after one or two technical issues) I wanted to share some short but clear and important tips that I think are essential in creating effective learning resources and activities with Xerte. You can view one of the LO’s I used via the screenshot below. Please note the copyright info.