Adapt Learning Community: Adapt Authoring: easy run on PC with Standalone Launcher

Hello everyone,

I'm happy to share with you a standalone launcher to easily install and run AdaptLearning Authoring Tool on your personal PC/laptop.

If you find too complex to install the Adapt Authoring following the official documentation, and you just want to give Adapt a try, please consider to run it with this standalone launcher.

The application is still in beta, I developed it for the need of the e-learning team a work with, and I thought it would be useful to someone else.

Your feedback is really appreciated ;)

Thanks, Fabio.

Fabio,

Thanks for sharing..will download over weekend and have a play early next week with it..

I have not been able to move forward with any adapt development due to not having time to get a quick reliable setup going.

While I did get a network setup going and few docker stacks, the lack of export and import of templates put a damper on it.

I would love to see this working in conjunction with moodle, maybe as a base to create fantastic learning resources and then IFrame them into courses within Moodle.

I think that's why the H5P team have done so well as they have cracked that core group of users that just want to develop and not want to worry about backend setup..

I will have a go with this and post feedback..

Thanks in advance for releasing to community..

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Hi Daniell,

if you have any issue, I would really appreciate if you could post them on the Github project page, just to track them well.

Let me say that actually Adapt is based on portable software/frameworks, but during the standard installation process some paths get hard-coded in the authoring source files. That's also why, even with the Standalone Launcher I did, you must copy and run the adapt package from your C:\ drive (C:\adapt\).

I will try to incorporate all feedback from people that will test this app, next I will bring adapt version 0.4 just released, and then make a Mac/Linux versions.

Thanks for you interest.

Note: I'm involved in H5P project too ;) . I'm porting the framework from PHP to NodeJS.

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Hi Fabio,

Thanks for sharing. One question --

Our team has found that courses created in Adapt are not "portable" to other Adapt installs.

Do you envision that people using your desktop tool -- that would be their ONLY dev environment where they'd author courses from start to finish, correct? I imagine that each individual ID would have their own install and could not work on each other's courses, correct? They wouldn't be able to, for example, start building a course on their laptop during a flight and then upload it to a department cloud instance of Adapt for further collaboration. Is that correct, or have you found a way around this?

Best,

Ted

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Hi Ted,

Let me say that I shared this tool to make easier for non technical people to give adapt a try. So let's say for testing purposes. In this scenario moving courses from one instance to others is probably not really needed.

In general, to bring this tool on production environments the best way would be to make it part of the main authoring development project.

By the way, the issue your are talking about sounds a bit strange and I must say that I didn't figured it, yet. Looks like a bug, but it might be dependent of an implementation: for instance WordPress (popular CMS) does something similar, unfortunately. In that case you lose portability because the CMS stores absolute paths to resources into the database.

I'm now really curious to see if this happens to adapt too.

I'm assuming that the test you did, moving course source package from one adapt install to another one, you had the same adapt framework version as well as the same adapt authoring tool version. Could you please confirm that?

Thanks for your interest in this project.

Regards, Fabio.

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Hi Ted

Our team has found that courses created in Adapt are not "portable" to other Adapt installs.

This sounds a lot like something that the forthcoming import/export feature of the authoring tool will enable.

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Hi Ted,

YES ;) as Matt said the latest release of AT has a feature to export/import a course from one AT instance to another one.

"Will allow users to export a course that they are working on, and import it into a different Adapt authoring tool installation. Your course will no longer be confined to the installation it was created in; collaborate with colleagues, easily back up your work, and make it simpler to duplicate courses across installations."

I will play with the new version and try to make the Standalone Launcher work with it.

Cheers, F.

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Hi Ted,

this morning I downloaded the latest version of the AT (0.4), and unfortunately the "Import Course" feature is not there yet :(

So you are right, the source of a course created with the AT (either online on a web server or locally in your PC with the Standalone Launcher) can be exported but CANNOT be re-imported in another AT.

Actually, the import feature is in the road-map for the current downloadable version (0.4), maybe the devs group will release it soon with the first set of fixes (0.4.1). Really waiting for it!

As of now, the Standalone Launcher can help you to quickly run and give Adapt a try, if you have never used it before. As soon as the course import feature will be released, you may use the Standalone Launcher, and Adapt installed locally on your PC/laptop, for production work too.

Thanks! Cheers, Fabio.

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Hi Ted,

I played I bit this weekend and I found some kind of work-around to the problem of making a course done with AT available to other AT instances, doesn't work in all scenarios. Let me tell you about that...

1. The Standalone Launcher uses an AT instance that is portable, it's a self-contained package: application + DATA.

2. As you said is true that you cannot import a course (yet), but if you work with the Standalone Launcher you build the course in the "portable space" (C:\adapt\...mongodb data somewhere...)

3. You cannot move the course, but you can move the all AT instance: let's say from PC1 to PC2. This is a valid case if you work without collaborators, and you just need to move your work from a laptop to a desk PC or similar.

Really waiting for the export/import feature! :)

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Awesome! I have been trying installing Adapt on my local machine for a while now but get errors. This standalone Launcher is a huge help. Thanks.

When is the new version of Adapt Standalone (with Import/export) is going to be released?