Help
Print
Overview of Xen
Introduction
Xen enables your business or institution to offer multiple types of training, all from one platform.
You can train your customers, certify your partners, skill up employees, deliver certifications, or manage classrooms, and generally leverage education as marketing to get prospective customers interacting with your software.
Xen.Ed also allows you to scale up quickly to train learners around the world.
Discover how to meet each of these needs all within Xen.Ed, and offer different sets of classes to each group.
Types of Users
Xen supports different user types, and you can even created additional groups to match your own requirements.
For the purpose of this guide, we refer to the following user types, used in Xen.Ed by most customers:
- Learners
Learners get enrolled into your courses. They may be required to purchase the courses in order to gain enrolment.
Learners may also refer to Students, Parents, Customers, ... - Staff
Staff users are members of the courses team, who can create and run courses.
Staff may also refer to Instructors, Trainers, Moderators, Course Designers, Facilitators … - Administrator
The administrator users are the top-level users in your organisation. They can access the admin panels and configure hidden features of your tenancy. This role is generally given to the original Xen customer or to the IT department in your organisation.
Administrators may also refer to Owners, Admin, ...
You will find that articles in this Knowledge Base reference these terms indiscriminately. Some of these may be similar or different to roles within your particular industry or organisation. by default you should assume that we refer to them in the
The different parts of Xen
The power behind Xen comes from its architecture, allowing different modules to package the functionalities in your plan.
The two main components of Xen are the Learning Portal and the Authoring Tool.
Both tools are well designed and easy to use.
Optional modules
In addition, depending on your plan or agreement with Xen, you may also use
- Ecommerce
- Analytics
- Custom features
1. Learning Portal
The Learning Portal is the learner access point, or 'front-end'. This is where your learners will connect and follow the course.
This is also where instructors or trainers running a course can manage learners, contact them, and issue certificates - at a single course level
How to access the Learning Portal
The URL is usually something like “yourdomainname.xen.education”.
You can also access the Portal from the Authoring Tool by opening your course and selecting View Live.
Instructor View
All courses have an Instructor View available in the course header, which provides access to the course management interface for Instructors, Teachers, and any Staff member running the course.
2. Authoring content
Content Authoring is done in the Authoring Tool, which is a content management capability built-in Xen.
Learning & Instructional Designers can create or update the content (HTML, images, videos, audio, PDF, H5P, SCORM ...), upload files, set cohorts & permissions, and manage the grading, certificates, and publishing schedules.
Important
Please note that the Authoring Tool is not accessible by learners.
How to access the Authoring Tool
You can access the Authoring Tool from any existing course, by clicking the "Edit" command in the course toolbar. This will show the Course Outline in Edit mode, as pictured above.
You can also directly edit a specific page or unit of a course, by opening it in the Learning Portal and selecting 'Edit page'.
Creating courses using the Authoring Tool
Courses are created from your Dashboard and managed in the Authoring Tool, as well as all their related assets (upload of files, images, videos (optional) …).
All details about a course are managed in the Authoring Tool, using the Course toolbar to navigate.
Edit
Creating the structure and adding content using Components.
- Text - Insert HTML text, images, and tables to your courses.
- Video - Embed videos from another source, such as Youtube, or Vimeo.
- Polls - Enables a course author to create polls in course materials. Polls have one question, but you can have as many poll as needed in a course.
- Survey - Similar to a poll, but allows you to ask many questions with the same answer options, instead of just one.
- Peer Instruction - Allows learners to answer a question, and see what everyone else thought and why, to arrive at a deeper understanding of concepts.
- Open Response Assessments - Lets learners grade each other, grade themselves, or wait for a staff to grade an essay or file submission.
- Staff Graded Assignment - Allows learners to upload a file for manual staff grading.
- Free-text Response - Allows instructors to create questions that expect a free-text response.
- LTI Consumer - LTI stands for Learning Tools Interoperability, which enables you to pull in learning content from 3rd party sources.
- GoogleDocument - Enables embedding of Google Documents within a course.
- GoogleCalendar - Enables embedding of a Google Calendar within a course.
- PDF - Simplifies embedding a PDF in a page.pdf.
- ProblemBuilder - Provides an increased range of problem options for posing more varied questions problem-builder.
- StepBuilder - Enables you to ask questions in a sequence rather than listing them down a page.
- Completion - Allows a learner to mark an activity as complete and earn a mark for their progress chart.
- VectorDrawing - create vector drawing exercises.
- SCORM - Embed SCORM content into your courses.
Files & Upload
While creating your course you will likely need to upload files for your Learners to access, be it images you want to include in your lessons, or handouts you want to make available for students to download, you need to upload them to your course
first.
Textbooks
Allows you to add PDF extracts or full books, to go along with your courses.
Pages
You can add pages at the same level of your course, to support a Wiki, the Discussions, and any static content you would like to provide learners.
Updates
You can post updates & announcements for all learners to receive and find in the course.
Permissions
You can personalise some parts of the course to be accessed only by specific cohorts of Learners.
Team
you can manage your course building team and invite registered users to join.
Grading
There's a good chance you're going to want to grade the students who take your course. This screen allows you to configure the grading policy.
Certificates
By default, Certificates are available on all your courses and any new course you create. We'll configure the design for you as part of your onboarding process.
You can then use this screen to create and manage certificates.
Schedule & Details
Each course and course run has a unique start/end date & enrolment schedule. This screen allows you to manage all the details relative to running and showcasing your course.
Import / Export
You can export courses from Xen.Ed and re-import them.
Checklists
As the start date for your course approaches, the following checklist or timeline of activities can help you make sure that your course, and your learners, are ready to begin.
Advanced settings
All the settings of a course are accessible in this screen, aimed at the power users. Settings are stored in JSON format.
Structure of a course
In the Authoring Tool, courses are made of pages, which can be organised in logical Sections and Sub-sections.
Pages
Each page presents an individual list of content to the learner and is a navigation step. There is no limit to how many pages or content blocks a course may have, thought best learning practices suggests that you break individual content down to their smallest length..
Content blocks
Pages contain “Blocks” of content. You can add as many blocks of content into a page. The blocks can host any type of content supported by the platform (HTML text, video, problems, PDF, calendar, zoom link, …).
Depending on the course configuration, you will be able to access different components to insert various content types in your pages.
Synopsis
- Course
- Section
- Sub-Section
- Page (a physical page)
- Component (a block of any type of content)
- Page (a physical page)
- Sub-Section
- Section
Content Visibility
Each level of the course can be restricted be viewed by Learners or only the Staff - This allows instructors to manually release content as they see fit.
Alternatively, Content Blocks can be tagged with permissions to different Cohorts of learners using Content Groups, allowing Learning & Instructional Designers to hide or show specific content and personalise aspects of the courses to the intended audiences.
For example, matching learner cohorts of varied skillsets or competency levels with relevant content and adjusted difficulty for assessments.
You can learn more about this feature in the dedicated Adding permissions to content blocks using Content Groups article.
Scheduling & Course Run
Course can be scheduled to start and end at specific times, with an optional pre-enrolment period. The same course can be scheduled several times by changing its schedule once it has ended.
You can also offer the same course with different schedules by creating a new Course Run. This will make a copy of the course and allow you to update its content, schedule, cohorts, ... without affecting the original.
Within each course schedule & Run. you can schedule sections, sub-sections, and Pages individually to be available to learners at a specific date and time while the course is active.
An item will not be visible ("Draft") until it is published from the Authoring Tool.
Draft items are outlined in GREY.
Publishing makes the content live. If the course is running at that time, the changes are instantly visible to the learners. You can publish entire sections at once, as well as only specific items if preferred.
Published items are outlined in BLUE.
When changes are applied to any published content, the Authoring Tool will show the difference by alerting you to “Unpublished changes” for that section, subsection, and Page.
Unpublished changes are outlined in ORANGE.
FROGED