Hi Nick

With regards the multiple users functionality I did manage to get this working following the information from the following thread:

https://community.adaptlearning.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=1081

With regards the plugins that have no schemas and hence are not authoring tool ready, I suppose you could try and make them authoring tool ready yourself - see this thread for more info on the schema to do so.

https://community.adaptlearning.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=1152

Another alternative is to pay for a hosted solution from a company such as Learning Pool - they will give you multiuser functionality and may have more components available for the authoring tool than is available in the open source offering.

Hi Nick, 

My team has been working in the authoring tool for about six months now. We have 6 training writers with varying technical skills working in the tools and aside from some initial struggles with the 0.1.1 version, we've had no significant issues with the latest release. It takes a little bit of time playing around to figure out what all the fields and buttons do, but after you get the hang of it, the authoring tool is in the tool is dead simple even for non-technical users.  

We do use the single user account. While it doesn't quite feel "right", it hasn't been a roadblock for our team so far. The only issue is that there are some other groups within the organization that have seen what the tool can do and want to use it too. We don't quite know how to support them and deal with permissions, change management, etc without full user management, so we've had to turn them away. :(

We receive daily compliments about how beautiful/stunning/gorgeous/etc the courses look. We did put a lot of effort into customizing our theme and the graphics templates we use, but if you have one or two developers who can take care of that for the non-technical users then you're good to go. As Paul mentioned, creating your own plug-ins or adding schemas to existing framework-only plug-ins is not overly complicated if you have some coding skills on your team. And if you can contribute any of those changes back to the community or to the plug-in owners, then even better!  

There is currently no easy way to import/export courses from the authoring tool, but I know this feature is high on the list for the core development team: https://community.adaptlearning.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=988#p4780.  

Otherwise, my advice would be to make you sure have a solid backup strategy, use a different server to do your theme/plug-in development so you don't take down the production server, and don't be afraid to use the forums, they've been incredibly helpful and responsive. :)

Good luck!  

Ryan

Hi Nick

Here at City & Guilds Kineo we work directly with the Framework at the moment.

There are several reasons for this - but one of the main ones is that majority of our projects involve creating multiple modules/SCOs from the same src/theme - something which is not supported in either the AT or the framework CLI - so we have created our own CLI called RUB to handle this.

Historically at Kineo we have not used authoring tools very heavily but have instead worked as closely to the code as possible. The reasons for this are many - but from a technical perspective it makes life easier as Kineo's project work generally involves very high levels of customisation/bespoke e-learning, which is generally easier to do if you don't have to worry about how to do it in an authoring tool as well as in the framework itself.

Because we have always worked this way we therefore have a team of people whose responsibility it is to build the course based on scripts written by the e-learning designers.

We are certainly looking to start using the AT as soon as possible; the only reason we are not using it already is because some of the features we really need for our internal processes are still in development.

Even once we start using the AT, I'd anticipate that we'd still work directly with the framework on some of our more bespoke projects - or use a mixture of direct-with-framework and AT, once course import/export is added.

Hope this is useful.