Adapt Learning Community: Questions from a potential user

Hello,

My company is looking for a Training authoring tool and I came across Adapt and really like the concept and the way you trainings looks like.

I have a few questions before we decide to go for Adapt:

- How long does it take to learn how to produce a training with Adapt (for someone that has a good knowledge of usual office software but is not an IT person?). Our IT department will set up the software, but we would like the persons from the different teams to be able to produce content themselves?

- Is there some basic tracking functionalities built in Adapt (i.e. can a "trainee" easily send a message with the date and time at which he/she followed a training or can this type of information be directly sent to a database? Same question for the results of the quizzes.

- Can you confirm that Adapt can fully run on premises and does not require to any of our company data to be stored in the Cloud?

Thanks a lot in advance,

Emmanuelle

Hi Emmanuelle

How long does it take to learn how to produce a training with Adapt

In order to answer this we would need to know whether you are planning to to use the Adapt Authoring Tool or the Adapt Framework. I am guessing the authoring tool - but do please confirm.

Is there some basic tracking functionalities built in Adapt

Content built using Adapt can be published as SCORM (v1.2) so if you have a SCORM-compatible Learning Management System to load the course(s) onto you will be able to track things like users completing courses, their scores etc.

Can you confirm that Adapt can fully run on premises and does not require to any of our company data to be stored in the Cloud?

Yes I can confirm that.

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Hi Matt, hi all,

I was thinking of the Authoring tool. Our main goal is to make training content available in a confortable and user-friendly way to our team that is quite spread around the globe. The functionalities in the Framework 2.0 seem great but I think we would not have the technical skills to be able to really take advantage of it.

The type of tracking of use of the trainings I was thinking of it a functionality I have seen in ISpring, where an email is automatically sent to a preset email address once the quizz or course has been completed. We would not need anything any more sophisticated than this. We do not have a Learning Management System for now but could have this more "manual" approach.

And great for the confirmation that this would run on the premises.

Best and thanks again to you all for your answers.

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I was in your shoes for a project in mid to late summer and can offer insight on your first question. We were contracted to build a fairly simple LMS based website with one course in it for a local non-profit. We're experienced with LearnDash coupled with Wordpress so that's what we proposed. Fast-forward a month and the non-profit's national office saw the rough course and decided to put it on their national LMS system, which uses CrossKnowledge. This requires the course be built either using their built-in tool called Mohive, or a third-party authoring tool. Mohive was easy to use but very limited in capabilities. So we tried Adapt Authoring Tool. I setup the tool on a server (I'm an experienced web developer) and dove in.

I found the authoring tool to be very capable but I'm used to building Wordpress sites that have thousands of themes available to get you started. Adapt reminds me of Wordpress, except WITHOUT the ready-to-use, styled themes to get you started. Long story short, I struggled mightily to get the layouts to look the way I wanted. They require a ton of CSS work on the layout side of things. I was at the point of looking for an experienced Adapt author when I ran across Evolve, which has an authoring tool that is fully based on the Adapt Framework, but has been refined to create a GUI for virtually ALL CSS work. I will say that Evolve is not what I would call "easy." But it's easier to learn than the Adapt Authoring tool. Both are superb authoring tools but Adapt Authoring requires manual knowledge of CSS (which I have but don't do on a day to day basis).

Evolve goes VERY deep in terms of it's control of the Framework via its GUI, and it took me a couple of days to fully grasp how to use. In fact, I'm still figuring out where to go in the menus to change and update layouts. But I flat out could not figure some of that stuff out using the Adapt tool.

So for me...an experience web developer, designer and web host admin, Evolve saved my behind, because I was going to have to hire and pay an Adapt author in order to meet the client's deadline because I didn't have the time needed to learn it. With Evolve, I was able to keep the authoring in-house. I hate to recommend something that is NOT part of Adapt's eco-system on the forum. But their authoring tool requires some serious web design and CSS chops in my opinion. That's not a bad thing! It's just a fact.

But...if Adapt could get several dozen different themes setup to purchase for customers, ala Wordpress, that would make it MUCH easier to use for regular people that have technical skills but not advanced coding skills.

That's just my take on that first question. Evolve costs but it's reasonable per seat at about $40/month. I am NOT promoting it nor do I work for them or anything like that. Just trying to help you out before you take the plunge.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
www.videomi.com

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Hello Chris, hi all,

Thank you very much for your answer and for sharing your experience.

We do have webdeveloppers in house, but I do not think that the management will allow me to have them spend a lot of time on the creation of our trainings. So the ones that will be dedicated to this project are mostly persons that really do not have a developer's background and are just able to use usual office tools.

I thus have one more question: If we do not want, at least in a first stage, to change the appearance of the trainings, but rather to focus on pushing the content to the users (our texts, videos, quizzes, etc.) using the Vanilla theme. Would that be more manageable ?

Thanks again for your responses.

Best,

Emmanuelle

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Hi Emmanuelle,

Chris makes some very valid points about Adapt, and Bloom is indeed an excellent alternative solution.

A few points to add:

Although originally based on Adapt, Evolve and its output are completely proprietary and incompatible with Adapt. This likely goes for any e-learning authoring solution you choose; once you've invested and have content in a system, you don't want to find yourself wanting to back out and use something else. I suppose the biggest benefit Adapt has here is that there's no initial cost.
As Chris mentions, the Adapt open-source team only maintains a single theme, and there is currently no way to customise a theme in the authoring tool. Therefore, all styling/theming must be done in the source code, so HTML/Handlebars/CSS/LESS knowledge is needed (although the vanilla Adapt theme has been set up in such a way that a lot of variables have been gathered together into single files to make this as easy as possible). The community is very friendly, and will likely be able to advise you here.
Adapt's open-source nature and plugin-in architecture mean add-on functionality is easily shared among the community. If you have a quick browse of the plug-in browser, you'll that there's a pretty varied pool of plugins freely available to use in your courses.

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Evolve is also cloud-based, not sure if they do a version you can install on your own systems or not...

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Good point, certainly doesn't seem possible with their standard packages.

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Those are some great add-on points, especially the one about the available plugins and cost. I miss the ability to add a plugin to solve a problem or add functionality using a different authoring tool.

The point about the proprietary nature of output is also important because there seems to be no way to easily move a course or data from one authoring tool to the other, which would allow authors to leverage the strengths of several different authoring platforms, much the way a graphic or motion design pro or video editor uses multiple tools to build designs.

Chris Blair

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Hello Tom,

Thanks for your answers. I think that in a first stage we could live with the Vanilla theme and focus on making sure the content makes its way through. If our trainings are found to be useful by our employees and valued by management, we could then think of having someone spend some time making things more sophisticated in terms of style.

Do you think that use the Authoring tool and just the Vanilla theme would be sufficiently "non-techie proof"?

One more question: If we build trainings using the Authoring tool, can we later on modify them with Framework if we get to become more agile in the use of these things or manage to have a budget to have someone with technical skills work on it?

Best,

Emmanuelle

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Hi Emmanuelle,

The standard vanilla theme works very well, and has been tested against the full core plugin list/functionality/browser spec, so you can guarantee it'll work on all supported devices, and be fully accessible (not sure if accessibility is a concern for you). The only 'problem' with it is that it's a bit plain for most people. You can see the demo for a taste of how a course using vanilla will look here: https://community.adaptlearning.org/demo2/

On a side-note, you can try a theme I developed to mirror the community site: adapt-theme-community (warning: not anywhere near as well-tested as vanilla).

With regards to exporting: all courses can be exported into the framework format, and worked on 'offline'/outside of the authoring tool (there is a button in the tool for Admins to do this) -- I would recommend this for theme development, as it's a pretty tedious workflow to do it in a course that's in the tool (tweak theme -> package theme -> upload theme -> test theme...repeat...).One thing to note here is that we don't currently have an import function, so you won't be able to develop a course in the framework, and import in into an authoring tool install. However, you can expect a version of import to land in the tool very soon (i.e. in a number of weeks).

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At Appitierre's request I'd like to make one clarification/correction on Tom's point above:

Evolve and its output is indeed proprietary, and you cannot take a published Evolve Course and use it in any Adapt Product.

However, Evolve is not incompatible with Adapt as there is an Adapt course importer which accepts Adapt content from the framework or authoring tool.

Apologies for any confusion this has caused.

Pete.

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