eXe The eLearning XHTML editor

The eLearning XHTML editor (eXe) is an authoring environment to assist teachers and academics in the design, development and publishing of web-based learning and teaching materials without the need to become proficient in HTML or complicated web-publishing applications. 

The Web is a revolutionary educational tool because it presents teachers and learners with a technology that simultaneously provides something to talk about (content) and the means to hold the conversation (interaction).  Unfortunately, the power of this hypertext medium is constrained in educational settings because the vast majority of teachers and academics do not have the technical skills to build their own web pages, and must therefore rely on the availability of web developers to generate professional looking online content.  eXe has been developed to overcome a number of identified limitations:

• Much web-authoring software entails a fairly steep learning curve, is not intuitive or designed for publishing learning content.  Consequently teachers and academics have not adopted these technologies for publishing online learning content.  eXe aims to provide an intuitive, easy-to-use tool that will enable teachers to publish professional looking webpages for learning; 

• Currently, learning management systems do not offer sophisticated authoring tools for web content (when compared to the capabilities of web-authoring software or the skills of an experienced web developer). eXe is a tool that provides professional web-publishing capabilities that can be easily referenced or imported by learning management systems;
   

• Most content management and learning management systems utilize a centralized web server model thus requiring connectivity for authoring.  This is limiting for authors with low bandwidth connectivity or no connectivity at all.  eXe has been developed as an offline
  authoring tool without the requirement for connectivity.
  
  

• Many content management and learning management systems do not provide an intuitive WYSIWYG environment where authors can see what their content will look like in a browser when published, especially when working offline.  eXe's WYSIWYG functionality enables users to see what the content will look like when published online.

Installing eXe on a machine

Assuming that eXe will be installed on a machine having Windows (XP or Vista) as operating system.  The exe-install-xxx.exe file is an executable installer that installs exe files directly onto your PC hard drive in the standard way.  Note that because eXe stores some path names in its configuration file, it is recommend that you should always use the same installation directory for eXe (like `C:\Program Files\eXe\`) as you upgrade from one version to the next.  

1. First, go to http://sourceforge.net/projects/exe/files/eXe-1.04/eXe-install-1.04.exe/download to download the eXe program on your machine.  Now, follow the steps below to carry on with the installation of eXe:
2.  Save the executable file on your desktop
3.   Double click the eXe installer file and this will launch the eXe Setup Wizard
4.   Follow the instructions given in the wizard by clicking Next

The installer will install eXe into a folder called C:\Program Files\eXe\ and you will need to click Next to accept this default location

·         The installer will proceed by installing eXe completely

Once eXe has been installed on your machine, it is now ready to get started with it.