eXe Case Study

Context
CASE STUDY
Laidlaw College (formerly the Bible College of New Zealand) has been offering a distance degree and diploma for graduates for some years now. As of 2007, the College’s Centre for Distance Learning is now one-fifth of College EFTS. Courses make use of Moodle, scanned readings, and (increasingly) multimedia. The College employs part-time online tutors, trained internally.

Approach to Course Preparation
Course learning guides for new courses are prepared by an instructional designer, working with faculty. The instructional designer uses eXe to prepare the learning guide, ensuring a standard format suitable for both printed and electronic learning guides.

At the beginning of each semester students are provided with printed copies of all notes and readings. During the course, the electronic version can be updated by faculty. This allows us to keep a constantly updated version of the course live in Moodle, with all adjustments automatically encapsulated in the following semester’s print version.

Contribution of eXe

eXe has proved invaluable in this process, providing the following which are important to us:

• Consistency of formatting (always an issue!),
• Updatability,
• Acleanandattractiveappearance’
• Moodle compatibility.

We did not want our faculty to have to learn HTML or conform to a style sheet; eXe makes this so much simpler. It is intuitive to use, and results in content that is easily uploaded to Moodle. We are also able to make new iDevices specific to our own needs.

Advantages of using eXe
Without the use of exe we would need to maintain two parallel versions of the course – one for print, the other for HTML – or else require faculty to learn how to use an HTML editor. eXe is far easier to use.

The use of styles makes it particularly easy to update. Laidlaw College recently changed its name and logo etc (from Bible College of NZ) and the task of changing all of our course materials to reflect the new style.

Further, we can create our own ‘Laidlaw look’ in eXe, standardizing colours and icons to our own institutional flavor. eXe means that all headings and icons are used consistently.

Links
Laidlaw College - http://www.laidlaw.ac.nz/
eXe - http://exelearning.org
CORE enable - http://www.core-ed.net/enable
Moodle – http://www.moodle.org