Open Ed 2012, Vancouver, Invitation to talk and User Interface Testing

We are proud to present our newest OERPUB importers at Open Education for Education 2012 in Vancouver! If you want to see them in action, create an account at the Open Repository cnx.org and start importing and transforming your Google Docs, Word or MS Office files or even webpages here: remix.oerpub.org.

Our motto for authoring educational content is:

Everything in, Everything out, Everywhere.

Find out what that means at Kathi and Marvin's talk at 

• 11:50am today in Room C680, 
• "Share Everywhere: Creating Content with Legs".

We are currently creating a WYSIWYG authoring tool for easily remixable OER. It works with Connexions out of the box, and the new HTML5 format means you can customize it to work in other projects and content repositories.

We are testing the editor here at Open Ed. Come help us, and have a cookie, in room C215 at 

• 2:00 pm Tuesday
• 1:30 pm Wednesday
• 10:30am on Thursday

Image by Shades of Blue, Roxanne Ready. Used by Creative Commons license.

Usability goals for the editor:

1. The editor must support the incremental development of educational content.
2. The editor must be self-explanatory enough so that novice (first time) users can edit without training, yet powerful enough so that experienced users are efficient. Experienced users those who have published 5 modules, or 1 textbook, or that have received training.   
3. The editor must support the activity of infrequent users by leading the user by hand through tasks when necessary, so they need not remember details of proper procedure between uses.
4. The editor must be designed free of cultural assumptions to be used by persons from diverse cultures and geographical locations.
5. Using the editor should not require knowledge of the underlying technology.
6. The editor should be fun to use by all groups of users.
7. Authors that create educational content should think they would like to use the editor to create content for learners.
8. Authors' content should evolve toward more semantically rich "markup". For example, over time using the editor should result in increased use of headers, exercises, examples, and notes. Authors' images should be more likely to contain descriptions that aid visually impaired learners. Author's tables and images should be more likely to include titles, captions, and source information.

 See some videos of our work with the editor:

• Educational elements, drag and drop (2 minutes)
• Math editing video (2 minutes)
• Navigation and linking (1 minute)
• Tables editing (1 minute)
• Adding images with source, titles, captions, and accessibility (3 minutes)
• The full import/ alpha edit/upload process (2 minutes)