The project, funded by the Tertiary Education Commission and the e-Learning Collaborative Development Fund, is called eXe and is based on open source software.

EXe provides an editing environment that should allow teachers and academics to put together web content for e-learning, without having to know how to write code.

'The aim of the eXe project is to make the writing of e-learning material as easy as possible for teachers and academic staff, and then [to] link the material into their learning management systems so all the students can access it,' says Higgins.

Anybody who wants to write material for delivery through electronic learning should benefit enormously from this open source tool, says Higgins. EXe allows teachers to combine, for example, text documents, videos, PowerPoint presentations and assignments on their web pages.

The team behind eXe decided to go for open source partly for economic reasons. 'We were only able to hire a limited number of developers, so one of the best ways to do it was to build the core and get it running well, and then invite other members of the international open source community to suggest ideas, or put code together that we can use to enhance the product,' says Higgins.