VERB

Today I successfully used eXe (an e-learning content authoring and packaging program) to create a .zip IMS Content Package for a sample section of the VERB content. The sample package contains a series of text pages plus images for the diapsid lineage of animals, which includes familiar groups such as birds, crocodiles, and snakes. The first two screen shots below show parts of an example page - the crocodilians. In addition to a section of descriptive text, there is a bank of captioned images that can be clicked for closer inspection. The pane on the left allows quick browsing between different groups.

This whole process is pretty handy, as it’s a great way for other institutions to pick up, modify, reuse, and share the content that we, at UCL, have developed thus far. I essentially copied the text directly from the UCL VERB resource, which is held on the UCL Moodle server, and pasted it into the relevant pages I created on eXe. I then took the image files and uploaded them into eXe in special image panes (one of many so-called iDevices) I inserted into the bottom of each group’s page. This is held on eXe as a structured set of content, which can then be exported as an IMS Content Package. This was all very straightforward (if time consuming!). From this point, the package can be shared on the web and, once picked up, unpacked in any supporting VLE, such as Moodle. As the package remembers the structure of the site and all relevant metadata, the integrity of the resource is maintained. Well…almost.

Unfortunately I am having great difficulty with getting the hierarchical structure of the pages to behave. This is frustrating as the ability to create a hierarchical structure was something I was really excited about (really), as it provides the opportunity to structure the web books in a way that stresses the evolutionary history (phylogeny) of the groups in question - something that is not possible in the ‘book’ tool of Moodle that has been used to create the resource up until now, but is very important pedagogically. This can be seen in the screen shot below, taken from the eXe editing program.

The pane in the top left of the screen shot shows the branching structure, with pairs of parent groups at the same taxonomic level (e.g. Lepidosauria and Archosauria) undergoing sequential bifurcation steps. This is perfect. However, when packed by eXe as a .zip file and then unpacked in Moodle, the structural integrity of the hierarchy is lost…very annoying (see above - Archosauria is clearly no longer at the same taxonomic level as Lepidosauria, wrongly suggesting that archosaurs are a group of lepidosaurs).

But how can this be reconciled? I, unfortunately, do not have the expertise to know - yet. I am aware that eXe is open-source software, so hopefully someone will know what to do - perhaps check for errors in the source code. But maybe it’s all Moodle’s doing? Maybe other VLEs don’t have this problem. Time to find out!

The Virtual Educational Resource for the Biosciences (VERB) is an online teaching and learning resource created at UCL, designed to accompany and improve undergraduate degrees in the Biosciences. It contains a series of web books outlining the diversity of the animal kingdom from an evolutionary perspective, plus an associated glossary with hyperlinked entries. The topics of focus are phylogeny and anatomy, but subjects as wide as genetics, ecology, and development are discussed where relevant.

Students can browse the web books by taxon for revision purposes, or as part of a course. Once confident, revising students can test their knowledge using formative quizzes, whilst summative assessment is used in association with courses, such as a vertebrate diversity practical class.

Initially developed for Moodle (a Virtual Learning Environment, or VLE) on the UCL server, we are now working on an OER funded project to make VERB accessible to the wider Biosciences community, sharing so that other institutions can use, modify, and reuse the information. This will start only with the vertebrate diversity content, followed by the addition of other groups in the future.

The purpose of this blog is to keep the Biosciences community updated on our progress in making the resource available for use in undergraduate teaching worldwide. It also aims to act as an open repository for logging some of the many problems we encounter whilst trying to achieve this goal, so please feel free to comment if you have any advice!