The Web is a revolutionary educational tool because it presents teachers and learners with a technology that simultaneously provides something to talk about (content) and the means to hold the conversation (interaction). Unfortunately, the power of this hypertext medium is constrained in educational settings because the vast majority of teachers and academics do not have the technical skills to build their own web pages, and must therefore rely on the availability of web developers to generate professional looking online content. eXe has been developed to overcome a number of identified limitations:

* Much web-authoring software entails a fairly steep learning curve, is not

intuitive or designed for publishing learning content. Consequently teachers and
academics have not adopted these technologies for publishing online learning
content. eXe aims to provide an intuitive, easy-to-use tool that will enable
teachers to publish professional looking web pages for learning;

* Currently, learning management systems do not offer sophisticated authoring

tools for web content (when compared to the capabilities of web-authoring
software or the skills of an experienced web developer). eXe is a tool that provides
professional web-publishing capabilities that can be easily referenced or imported
by learning management systems;

* Most content management and learning management systems utilize a

centralized web server model thus requiring connectivity for authoring. This is
limiting for authors with low bandwidth connectivity or no connectivity at all. eXe
has been developed as an offline authoring tool without the requirement for
connectivity.

* Many content management and learning management systems do not provide

an intuitive WYSIWYG environment where authors can see what their content will
look like in a browser when published, especially when working offline. eXe’s
WYSIWYG functionality enables users to see what the content will look like when
published online.