Freeware authoring tools for the creation of e-contents: current experience

• Autor(a) principal: Reis, Pedro
• Data de Publicação: 2011
• Outros Autores: Damião, Isabel
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10284/2309
• topic: e-Content; Authoring tools; Learning objects; Distance education

E-contents play an important role in e-learning since the latter relies significantly on the former. Furthermore, e-content and e-learning face a number of challenges in producing viable modules for information enriched society and institutions. Hence, e-learning developers feel the need, for instance, to increase collaboration among learners, to create relevant practical activities for learners to participate in and to create content that today’s learners will find engaging. This represents an essentially intellectual and creative challenge, which is, basically, to produce imaginative, engaging and interactive designs that work with the browsers used by the target audiences, within realistic bandwidth constraints. Most of the professional development studios use their programmers to create custom tools that suit their own working methods and styles. In-house units and individual e-learning developers are much more likely to employ tools which help them to avoid the technical minefields and concentrate on the realisation of their designs. For this purpose, e-learning authoring tools do have their advantages, as they make it easy for e-learning developers to employ a relatively wide range of interactive techniques and to have their content communicate with a Learning Management System (LMS) at moderate costs or even for free. The use of such tools may imply some loss of flexibility since the easier the tool is to use the less one can do with it. However, the real worth of e-learning content is in the design and the writing, so, in our view, one should accept sacrificing a little flexibility if it implies a sensible budget and timetable. Based on our current use of freeware authoring tools (such as eXe-learning, Xerte or CourseLab), they seem to have the right functionalities for the production of engaging Learning Objects (LO) and a way of delivering the end-product that conforms to the hardware and software capabilities of our audiences. In sum, we would like to demonstrate with our current experience as e-learning developers how subject-matter experts may work directly with these tools, to populate the templates with content. For maintenance, this content may be stored in a database, although for delivery it may be converted to standard HTML.