Xerte enables teachers with limited IT experience to create rich and interactive resources for learners. By being web-based, learners can access the resource out of lessons / lectures and even on their mobile phones. This supports learners by giving them any time / any place access to your resources. If internet availability is limited, any learning objects you create can be exported for local use via USB sticks or CD-ROMs.

See our Getting Started: Xerte Basics guide for help creating your first Xerte project.

When choosing an elearning authoring tool for use within your organisation there are many factors to consider. Here are some of the reasons why Xerte is a popular choice amongst a wide range of organisations:

Accessibility
The high native accessibility and the range of pedagogical opportunities available in Xerte mean that your organisation will be empowered to support a wide range of learners. Installing Xerte Online Toolkits and training staff in its use is a tangible and practical accessibility policy.

Collaborative culture
Organisations benefit when staff are open to learning from one another and developing resources together. Xerte makes it easy for staff to collaborate on teaching and training, to use one another's resources, develop jointly or adapt materials for different contexts. This is excellent for quality assurance.

It doesn’t have to just be staff utilising the collaborative features of Xerte; students can collaborate with each other to create resources that can be shared with their peers.

Support of multiple teaching / training sites
Xerte Online Toolkits is server based and therefore produces online resources that can be accessed across multiple sites or from learners’ own homes. It is quick and easy to export any learning object to run from a CD or memory stick for use in teaching contexts where connectivity could be an issue.

eLearning and mLearning
Organisational efficiency improves when learners can access learning resources at any time or place. Learning can improve when resources are available with inbuilt self-testing and feedback opportunities. Xerte allows learning objects to be viewed on tablet and mobile devices so content can be accessed out of traditional classroom environments.

Costs & implications for teams
As Xerte is open source there is no software or licence cost involved. An IT team can install Xerte Online Toolkits in an afternoon and the template driven interface allows staff with limited technical skill to create interactive pages in a very short time frame.

Before installing Xerte it is recommended that someone from your technical team joins the Xerte mailing list so they can receive notification of any new updates that are released to add new functionality or fix identified bugs. It’s also worthwhile identifying a member of staff to be your Xerte administrator who, with access to the management features of Xerte, can manage tasks such as changing the ownership of projects when a member of staff leaves your organisation. We also recommend that staff development and disability teams become familiar with the potential of Xerte to support different kinds of learners in different settings.

Sustainability
It has now been over ten years since the first Open Source version of Xerte Online Toolkits was released. Why has Xerte remained a popular choice throughout this time? First of all there is an enthusiastic community of developers who listen to and act upon to the needs of the user base. There are usually a couple of new releases of the software every year, each bringing with it new features and enhancements. Projects made in earlier versions of Xerte won’t stop working after upgrades even when the major changes are made such as the change from Flash to HTML5 several years ago. A project made in 2008 will still work in the most up to date of installations in 2019! When members of staff leave your organisation their work within Xerte is not lost. Your Xerte administrator can transfer their projects to a new owner if required.

Commercial Support
If you need commercial support with establishing, troubleshooting or upgrading your installation, hosting Xerte, custom developments, training, or any other Xerte support then we highly recommend the following companies who are directly involved in and directly contribute to the Xerte project. You can contact them via the following links:

Each are longstanding members of the Xerte community and provide excellent service at great prices.

Learning technologists can find themselves acting as a bridge between teaching staff (with high subject skills but limited technical skills) and professional content developers (with high technical skills but limited subject skills).

Traditionally this creates a bottleneck in producing learning resources because the teaching staff have to explain the subject matter to the developer as well as describing the pedagogical interactions required. Xerte removes the bottleneck by empowering the tutors to create most (and often all) the interactivity they require. Developers only need get involved where custom content is required that isn’t available in Xerte. This means tutors AND developers can use their expertise more effectively and learners end up with many more resources produced.

Maximising efficiency
As a learning technologist you are likely to find yourself advising course teams on how to make more efficient use of time and resources. Teachers are often keen to have interactive online resources but can be very fussy about the resources other people create because they have their own way of describing things or their own case studies that they want to use. Xerte is an ideal platform for maximising efficiency because it is so easy to take an existing learning object and tweak it to suit your preferred vocabulary.

Integration
Xerte integrates well with VLEs such as Moodle and Blackboard where projects can be either embedded within a page or accessed via a link opening in a new window. Content from other platforms, such as YouTube and Flickr, can be incorporated into Xerte projects to seamlessly blend your content and that from elsewhere.

Learners as content creators
Some institutions have used Xerte Toolkits as a tool for learners to create their own content in a flipped classroom model. Explore several Higher Education projects using Xerte Toolkits to develop digital literacy with students.

Get involved
Xerte is developed and maintained by an enthusiastic community of developers. Discussion amongst the developers often takes place on the Xerte-dev mailing list which is open for anyone to join, as well as on GitHub. If you want to get involved please get in touch - we welcome any contributions however big or small! Those involved in the ongoing development of Xerte might be adding new functionality to existing page types, developing new page types / templates or extending the site functionality by working with the PHP, MySQL/MariaDB, HTML & JavaScript code.

GitHub
The project's source code is available via GitHub and you can also download the most recent stable release of the code here on the Xerte website.

To work with the Git repositories you may wish to install and use TortoiseGit a wysiwyg client for working with Git Repositories. This is very useful even if all you want to do is obtain the latest development code which you can do without officially becoming part of the developer community. Please note that the develop branch on GitHub contains the most up to date developments but this may not be stable code.

Customisation
As a developer using Xerte there are few limits on what you can develop. Use the ‘Script’, ‘Styles’ and ‘Stylesheet’ optional properties within the project editor to influence the look, feel and functionality of an individual project using CSS and JavaScript/jQuery. Create a theme to bring your organisation’s branding to every learning object created on your Xerte installation. Add new functionality to a page type or even create a new page type or template to accommodate your specific requirements. The possibilities are endless! We are currently working on improving the documentation for developers but current guides are listed in this documentation guide.

Reporting issues & bugs
Please use the Xerte-dev mailing list or GitHub issues to report any bugs you find in Xerte. More general questions should be either posted to the mailing list or the forum on this site. When asking a question on the Xerte forum please consider taking the time to see if you can help answer any of the questions other users have posted. The community works best when we all contribute.

If the institution you are studying at has a Xerte installation then you may have already viewed Xerte content in your learning. But did you know that as a student you are likely to also have access to create projects using Xerte? You could be using Xerte to create your own resources as an alternative to written assignments. Assessments could be much more collaborative and media rich as you use Xerte to demonstrate your understanding in a non-traditional way.

See our Getting Started: Xerte Basics guide for help creating your first Xerte project.

If your institution doesn't have a Xerte installation - why not? Are you fed up of all your learning materials being printed handouts? Are all your tutor's online resources just "paper behind glass" without interactivity or self testing opportunities? If so, consider asking your student council / student union to lobby your learning provider to create richer learning resources using Xerte.

Xerte learning objects are not just about students sitting there looking at more interactive information. Xerte allows you to take your learning - or creation - with you wherever you go. Xerte is compatible with your laptop or tablet and for viewing and learning even your phone. Create on the go, revise on the go!

Want to know what students think of Xerte? Students at the University of Bristol collaborated in groups to create Xerte projects which they then shared with their peers. A short video of their feedback is available.

Download
The latest version of Xerte can be downloaded from the downloads page of this site. There is no charge for you to download, install and use the Xerte.

System Requirements
See the System Requirements page of Xerte’s release notes for current details.

Costs
Although Xerte has no immediate financial implications with regard to its licensing and download each organisation will experience some cost in terms of staff time dedicated to its installation and maintenance. However, these costs when compared against the cost of purchasing individual or site licences of alternative propriety software are relatively low.

Scalability
Once Xerte is installed on your servers it is completely scalable. As an e-learning authoring tool Xerte makes it easy to provide every member of staff with access to a powerful yet simple to use authoring tool. Once installed on a server and made available staff can register for an account and once verified via your chosen authentication system can begin to author learning content.

Enterprise ready
Xerte is used by organisations large and small across the world. The University of Nottingham has been hosting Xerte since 2008 and it has proved to be extremely popular amongst its teaching staff for the creation of content with over 20,000 projects created to date. Moreover there is a large and growing community of users around the globe who also run Xerte and have been very supportive of the project because of the benefits they derive from it.

Security
As of the time of writing there have been few bug reports submitted regarding the software. Should there be a problem these will be addressed through fixes provided by the online community. If you would like to help then please look at the developers section of this community site for bug reporting, fixes and for details on how to join the community.