Exercist

• The problem that exercist is trying to solve
• Flexibility of use
• Use Cases
• Structure of an Activity
• Demonstrations
• Older Notes

Live material:

• Manual & Documentation
• Gallery of examples, for inspiration

Related

• Re-usable learning activities
• Taking a Design Pattern approach to learning objects

November 10, 2007 – Tutorials on Actionscript 3. Absolute Novice level finished.

October 5, 2007 – We start to get a knack of Actionscript 3.0. Three extra activities uploaded. matching, type the correct answer, vocabulary memory. Click on the “Files” tab to get access to the source code.

August 13, 2007 – That's it, we have published our first activity written in Flex. Check out the live demo

Update June 19, 2007 – Okay, we got a huge number of problems with the product we wanted to use for this project. It looked like the best option on the surface, easy to learn, fast to implement, etc. However, an important problem that it was proprietary and despite our best efforts it was never possible to reach a sensible agreement with the company.

So, we will go for open source solutions. Javascript and Actionscript (Haxe and Flex) and give Apollo a try. Give me a month or two to learn actionscript to appropriate level.

Exercist is an exercise editing software that allows the easy creation and editing of exercises.

It is particularly tailored towards exercises that successfully promote interactivity, learner engagement, and learner control and that involve both text and multimedia (such as image, video and audio) and user interactions like drag and drop.

The editing software assumes instructional design skills but only a basic competence in working with computers. Any technical requirements imposed by the media is being dealt with by the software. There is no need for the user to know anything of the technology behind the exercises. Because of this, teachers can concentrate exclusively on the instructional aspects of exercise creation and worry only about their primary goal: meet educational standards and create excellent assessments.

Once defined, the content of these exercises is automatically stored into a standard compliant format, in order to promote easy exchange of these resources (with colleagues inside our departments or in other Universities), as well as easy integration with existing learning environments (WebCT, Qmark Perception, etc.)

First release! You can now download a demo of some of the interactive exercises that can be edited with Exercist from the file release directory at eduforge.

Use the content editor to specify the exercise content.

Press “Define Position Interactively” to define the top left position for each position. This is done by simple drag and drop of the label to the desired position. Any change in the position of the labels on the image will be automatically reflected in the left and top values of the label.

Press the save button. Specify a folder where to store the exercise, as requested. To use the exercise, simply open the html file in a browser. To publish the exercise on the web, simply upload the html file as well as the “media” folder in a directory. Point to the html file to run the exercise.

Job Done!

Check out the links below for more specific information.

All exercises in the gallery below could potentially be implemented. Open the gallery in a new page

specs editor

“Adobe Flex is a complete, powerful application development solution for creating and delivering rich Internet applications (RIAs) within the enterprise and across the web. It enables enterprises to create personalized, multimedia-rich applications that dramatically enhance user experience, revolutionizing the way people interact with the web.” (souce Adobe)

The big news is that Adobe provided a Flex SDK that includes the Flex Framework 2 and the command line compiler (compc) + documentation for free with no licensing or extra charges to develop and deploy applications.

• How to compile
• How to change activity content
• I have some experience coding in Flash, can I use it with Flex?

For those who feel like writing activities of their own, a tutorial is being written in collaboration with Daniel Schneider, educational technology research and teaching unit at University of Geneva.

• ActionScript 3
• Flex
• Flash CS3

That material is written in wiki format, under a by-nc-sa license. The wiki format means that you are much welcome to improve or expand the material there. You only need to take 30 sec. to register to do so (registration is unfortunately required to keep automatic spamming engines out). The creative common license means that if you find it more convenient, you are authorized to reuse the content, in part or in all on your own website. If you do so, we kindly ask you to give proper credit (the BY part which means by attribution), to avoid to do so in contexts where you will generate an income from that activity (the NC part means Non commercial. To use it to support lectures is ok; to publish a book with you as author is not), and to license any derivative material under a similar license (the SA part, which stands for share-alike).

• eXe
• starQuiz