exelearning Portable

exelearning Portable is an open-source authoring environment designed specifically for helping web design students generate web content without having to possess XML or HTML markup language knowledge.

It also comes in handy for teachers who want to publish webpages for learning. It implements support for an offline working mode (you don’t need an Internet connection) and preview of the web content to check how it looks like when it's published online.

This is the portable version of the utility which means you can deploy it directly on the target computer without having to go through installation steps. It doesn’t store entries in your Windows registry, so you may run it without administrative privileges. Copying it on any USB flash drive or other devices is also possible.

exelearning Portable sports a user-friendly layout that gives you the possibility to create the structure of your content in the Outline panel. You may construct an outline that reflects a preferred hierarchy (e.g. book-chapters-notes).

The iDevices panel reveals a list with structural elements that highlight the learning content and activities, such as objectives, pre-knowledge, case studies or text.

A learning resource may include multiple elements, images, math equations, video and audio formats, or other resources into any iDevice’s rich-text fields. Plus, you may create your own device iDevice using the built-in editor.

The rich text editor allows you to alter the text in terms of font, color and alignment, cut, copy, paste or delete clipboard data, insert tables, undo or redo your action, remove formatting from the selected text, as well as enable the HTML raw source editor.

You can create a Home page (it’s the first one displayed when exported), insert additional pages, as well delete, rename, extract or merge pages.

There’s support for a wide range of elements that define the learning content, as you may attach an external URL to your content, upload and label multiple images, use a photo magnifier, load simple Java applets into the working environment, add multi-choice questions and SCORM quizzes, and embed articles.

Each project can be personalized by providing information about the title, background image, author, license, footer, description and taxonomy data.

Content defined in exelearning Portable can be saved to a web package ready for publishing to a web server, SCORM 1.2 package for delivery to SCORM compliant LMS, an IMS content package, single webpage suitable for printing, plain text file for display on mobile devices, or iPod Notes files.

In conclusion, exelearning Portable comes with an intuitive layout and a decent feature pack for helping you develop learning content and resources. On the downside, the program takes a lot of time to reveal the components and apply the editing tasks, so improvements regarding its speed reaction time are welcomed.