Adapt Learning Community: First adaptation of a course / my notes and questions

Hi,

I have been interested in this project since the meeting in London last summer. Unfortunately I have not had much time to invest in the project. Took part in some discussions when this forum launched but have been busy with other things since then.

Intro

I have dowloaded and installed the framework. Started playing with it and have adapted a course that was created in another tool to Adapt.

It is quite easy to work with when you work within the boundaries set by the shipped course. Great work on this....

Notes

The one thing that makes it a bit harder than it might have been is that all articles, blocks and components are in the same json files. Would have been easier (at this stage) if they were more separated.

I also find it hard that if there is any error in the course it will not load and you will get no indication as to what is wrong. Could be an error in a json-file or it could be that an image-file has an incorrect name. Some kind of error message would help immensly.

Questions

* I am working with one course at the moment but will soon be working with multiple courses, multiple themes. Can you do that in the framework or do you need to set up one framework for each course?

* Is there any documentation on the components and their settings, which settings are available and what you can set them to?

* Is there any documentation on optimal sizes of mediafiles (images, video etc) when having different layouts?

* Is there any documentation on creating new components?

* How can you set background images for articles / blocks?

* How can you create one short course that does not need any menupage but has all components on the frontpage?

* Coding of text. In order to get swedish charcters to show up correctly they need to be encoded, like "å" for "å". How will this be handled in the authoring tool?

Conclusion

This looks very promising for the future. I hope I will be able to give something back in the future when my schedule allows.

Again, great work and thanks for making this Open source....

Best regards,

Martin Sandberg

Hi Martin,

Thanks for your detailed feedback. You've raised some good points and I've answered what I could below. I'm hoping somebody else can get back to you on the things I miss.

As of version 1.0 of the framework, the JSON has indeed been split into separate files for config, articles, blocks, components, contentObjects and the course itself. Please see the sample course for an example:
https://github.com/adaptlearning/adapt_framework/tree/master/src/course/en

Regarding your point about identifying errors in your course, the core development team had a discussion about this yesterday and this is an area we are seeking to improve in a future version. Daryl has already added JSON lint to the grunt task. While we haven't decided on the exact approach yet, I have a feeling that a component schema validation is in the pipeline, with a possibility to building a debug version of your course and providing more detailed error information when there is a problem.

On your point about working on multiple courses, right now there are a couple of options:

Multiple versions of the framework dedicated to each course and theme.
One framework where you copy in the theme and course you are currently working on.
If you are familiar with Git, you could also create separate branches for separate courses, switching branch when you want to work on another course.

You can find some component documentation on the corresponding GitHub repository, in the README.md and example.json. If you find gaps we'd welcome any effort to expand the documentation.

Are you aware of the Wiki page?
https://github.com/adaptlearning/adapt_framework/wiki

This contains some documentation on how to create plugins. I think a screen cast is planned for the near future which should detail topics such as this.
Hope this helps a bit. Thanks again for your construct feedback and any contribution you can make to the project in the future would be appreciated.

Regards,

Brian

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Huge thanks for your detailed answer.

It was as I suspected not ideal for working with multiple courses at this moment. Will have to consider the best approach.

Will have a look at the documentation on creating components. I am going to have to create a couple in the future.

Martin

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I have found using branches in git along side a descent git GUI git client like sourcetree or an IDE with git integration like CODA 2 or Eclipse to be really easy to work with on multiple modules, just be careful if changing the gitignore when you start mucking around with the templates

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Hi Martin.

Just a quick response to say that, although I can't answer your question about the authoring tool, within the framework, as long as your JSON files are encoded as UTF-8, not ANSI, you should be able to include native language characters without encoding them as you showed. Note that this requires the font you're using to support those characters, but if they display correctly with the html-encoded versions, they should do so natively too.

Cheers,

Kev

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A quick note about the Authoring Tool support for Unicode. The Tool uses NodeJS and Mongodb on the backend - both of these default to UTF-8 when reading and writing strings (see: http://nodejs.org/api/fs.html#fs_fs_writefile_filename_data_options_callback and http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/bson-types/#string).

There are some ways by which character encoding can be lost when manipulating strings, but we should be able to keep on top of such issues throughout the development of the tool. Our rich text editor on the client side should support international characters without forcing users to use html entities.

Bottom line: the Authoring Tool will be required to support international characters when editing and publishing your content.

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