Hi all,

As you probably know, Learning Pool has been heavily involved in the development of the Adapt Authoring Tool for the last couple of years. At the same time we’ve been rolling this out as a commercial service and we now have nearly 2,000 people across 200+ customers using Adapt to create and update great e-learning content. As we’ve watched people getting up to speed with Adapt and seen how easy they’ve found learning to use this technology, the overall vision of the Adapt project has been rumbling in the back of our minds – namely to secure mass adoption of Adapt.

From April this year, Learning Pool is going to do something about that which we think is going to be really significant – we’re making the Adapt Authoring Tool freely available online. Our commitment to this initiative is that Adapt OS will be completely free to users forever and only a quick click away. We think that by removing the pain of installation and maintenance we’ll get many more users of Adapt and the feedback and hopefully the support that generates will deliver enormous value back to the community and to the collaborators who work on the project.

I’m proud that Learning Pool is taking the lead on this and looking forward to seeing the reaction. We have set up a registration page on www.adaptbuilder.io so if you are interested you can register from today and we’ll let you know when the service is ready to use in April or before if you fancy a beta test. We’re hoping to get the opportunity to discuss our plan with the Adapt Steering Group in the coming weeks and to get their support to bolster our efforts and make this initiative a big success. We’d also love to get some help from members of the Adapt Community, both before we launch and after we go live.

It’s fair to say that we haven’t fully thought through our long term strategy beyond making Adapt available as a free service. That said it’s fairly clear that there’ll be some nominal charging for additional storage or functionality that’ll apply to users who are getting significant benefit from the free service. We can work out the details on all that but my thoughts are shifting towards the bigger long term picture and to understanding what other collaborators or contributors might be interested in achieving.

So I’d really welcome your input into what you’d like to be able to do with an Adapt service that is freely available – please let me know your views on this in the comments below, email me at paul[at]learningpool[dot]com or drop by the Learning Pool stand at Learning Technologies in London next week for a coffee and a chat.

Paul

Learning Pool CEO