Adapt Learning Community: Considering Adapt - Questions Regarding Functionality

Hi Everyone, First congratulations on all of the hard work that must have gone into building the system. We're looking at taking Adapt on for all of the great benefits, but I'm finding it hard to establish what can and cannot be done with the platform. I figured I would list some of the functions we use in our existing LMS to see if these are available.

We sell courses online and because of this we need to restrict people's access to one or two courses. Most of our training is via video, but we would like to split the content of the training with interactive activities and quizzes.

1. Interactive activities.

We have seen some simple learning activities linked with animation created in Storyline. I cannot see anything that replicates this in the plugins available or mention in Webinars. Does anyone have any suggested ways of managing this?

2. The ability to replicate a course

Some of our course content is the same. Can we replicate an entire course, rename it and then modify components of that course? Or do we need to reconstruct each one and the components individually?

3. The ability to manage permissions of people in and out of courses

While we may have 20 courses on offer, we want people to only access the course they have enrolled in. Is this possible?

4. Bulk uploading of new students to multiple courses

If we enrol 100 students across different courses, can we do it in a single bulk upload?

5. Reporting

Can we report on the % of a video watched?

6. Hosting videos

I notice on the website the expression "for small videos" was used. Some of our videos might go up to 15 minutes in one block. Should we embed videos from our Vimeo Pro account? Or should we host locally?

Is there someone in Australia offering Adapt development services?

Thanks in advance.

James

Hi James,

thanks for your query. I thought I'd give you a quick (but probably not very detailed) response.

The list of functions you describe is a mixture of authoring and LMS functionality. Adapt functionality is really only on the content creation side - i.e. the system used to create interactive, digital learning resources. Unlike an LMS, Adapt doesn't allow you to manage the delivery of the resources to your intended audience. So, in short, Adapt allows you to create eLearning resources and publish them (i.e. create a standalone web or SCORM eLearning resource; this is item number one in your list) - once that's done you'll still need to find a way of delivering them to your users and managing who has access etc (i.e. most of the other items in your list).

Some more detailed pointers:

1. Interactive activities
It's probably a good idea to see some examples of what you can create using Adapt. There is a list of examples here. There is also a further breakdown of the available functionality for the interactive output of the authoring tool here.

2. The ability to replicate a course
Most Adapt resources (or courses as we call them) will likely become part of a course in an LMS (e.g. Moodle, Totara or others. It's the course within the LMS, which holds data like who is enrolled, tracking data etc. I assume you are interested in replicating the course in the LMS so that you can re-run or make available different instances. The Adapt Authoring Tool is just about the authoring, not the delivery (however, we are working on making it possible to replicate a course within the Authoring Tool for authoring purposes)

3. The ability to manage permissions of people in and out of courses
Again, there are two sides of this: Authoring and Delivery. Adapt only takes care of the authoring side. It would be the LMS in which you can assign who is enrolled as student, tutor etc.

4. Bulk uploading of new students to multiple courses
This functionality only exists in the LMS.

5. Reporting
Gathering and pulling reports of learner usage are LMS features. Within Adapt, you'd need to configure the reporting standard. Adapt currently enables you to produce SCORM 1.2 conformant content and we're very excited to be implementing the xAPI / Tin Can standard (more info here)

6. Hosting videos
This is probably most relevant to how you author, i.e. to the Adapt portion as opposed to the LMS. There are several methods available (embedding in the course or using an external player). There are pros and cons to each (e.g. firewall issues not allowing external content vs. external players taking care of conversion and delivery into suitable video formats). Some questions you'd need to ask yourself is whether you'll need to have the content available offline (in which case don't host externally) and what your users are allowed to access and the costs in hosting externally etc. Generally, my feeling is that more and more people choose external players. Regardless of that, I'd say its a good idea to split the videos up into smaller chunks and break up the experience for the user, e.g. via inserting some interactions etc.

Hope this helps!

Sven

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Hi Sven,

Thank you very much for your detailed response. It's extremely helpful and explains a lot. I had read a lot of information before this so it's maybe a bit of a gap.

That answers a number of questions. I wasn't clear Adapt was an Authoring Tool, I thought it was a combination of both. That makes it much simpler, we'll continue looking for an LMS that has the capacity to offer the functionality we need.

Regarding the video, I suspect we'll look for a 3rd party option - but thank you for the heads up around firewalls. It's not something we had considered.

I'll place an update here when we make the final decisions. It may update other newcomers.

Many thanks

James

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James,

Regarding #1, a gentleman on this forum created a web object component for Adapt that should suit this need. My plan has been to build interactive pieces in Adobe Edge Animate, but theoretically I suppose you might be able to build them in Storyline and include them that way. Not sure about how the tracking would work if you wanted to be able to score them, though.

Here's a link to the web object component: https://github.com/ndeighan/adapt-webObject

Arend

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