TOPIC:

Hi everyone,

The momentum for using Xerte is slowly growing at my institution and the next stage is getting our own installation however I need to provide a business case. I would be grateful for any pointers from the community e.g. server specifications etc from those who have managed to get their own institutional installation of Xerte. How did you sell it?

Benefits of using Xerte with students (from last week's Xerte Friday)
* Mobile friendly
* Raises accessibility awareness
* Gives students new challenges/opportunity to develop digital literacy skills
* Enhances employability skills
* It's Free!

Benefits of using Xerte with staff
* Requires no technical knowledge
* Easy to use interface
* Re-usable bite-sized learning objects
* Raises accessibility awareness
* Supports collaboration and sharing of learning objects within school and across institution as well as externally

thanks in advance

Alison

Hi Alison,

Just a quick question, are you speaking of XOT?
If so I'm not sure I understand how we can help as XOT is here to create content that wil be placed on a LMS/LCMS system.
If you want to use Xerte another way, could you please be more specifc so it is possible to give you guidance about sizing depending on your project?

Thanks in advance.

Hi Alison
I'd add that it isn't just mobile friendly it provides cross-platform multi-platform authoring e.g. author once consume/access on just about any platform.

Here's a quick link to an old but mostly still valid blog post which might contain some other points to include: mitchellmedia.co.uk/331
Some of the links in there might break as it's quite old now but as I say still valid.

Also www.jisctechdis.ac.uk/techdis/technologymatters/Xerte

HTH
Ron

Thanks Eric and Ron for your response. Yes it is XOT we are wanting to install. I've put the business case together now but management want to know timescale for implementation so they can allocate resources to this. Any advise?

thanks
Alison

Weight and collaboration are huge wins for Xerte! The fact that you can build lightweight learning objects from multiple access points or allow different users to easily contribute to the same project is huge. XOT's web interface is speedy and responsive. The HTML5 output is true HTML5 rather than Flash forced into an HTML5 container. Although not as polished as some of it's commercial competition, it's free and powerful.

I'd also add it's open interface. At work, we use Captivate and Xerte to build learning objects and I find myself going to Xerte for most of my dev because I can easily drop a youtube video into a slide or pageview a wikipedia page. Additionally, if I need to 'pop the hood' to get into some of the underlying code then I can do so pretty easily. I think it's worth a business investment.

Thanks for all the pointers and advice. Early indication is that management are keen to implement but it may not be in time for the start of next academic year. Nonetheless, good news :-)