Adapt Learning Community: Course completition tracking

Hi guys,

First of all congratulations for this great iniciative, I'm really excited about Adapt.

I have my own node.js web server that i use to publish the adapt courses i've created. I wanted to know what is the best approach to track my learners progress during their courses without the use of a LMS server.

I have placed a post request inside Adapt's app.js file that fires every time an article's 'change:_isComplete' event happens. It works

Now the problem is: when a learner loads a course, how do I force some articles to load as completed?

I'm really new to e-learning developing in general, so any help will be much appreciated!

Hi Erik,

welcome and great to hear you are excited by Adapt!

Seeing as you mentioned you're relatively new to e-learning, I thought I'd give you give some general pointers (and let others answer your specific technical queries).

The most common way of tracking e-learning is using the SCORM 1.2 standard (check out this Wikipedia overview). It's not the latest but the most commonly used version. You can find the official documentation and spec here on the ADLNet website.

SCORM 1.2 is implemented in our Spoor extension but does require a SCORM API (not necessarily a full LMS) to listen out and track the data. You''ll also need to capture at least a unique user ID.

This standard will likely be superseded by xAPI (aka tin can), which is a more modern and extendible standard to track learning (or experiences in general). Regardless, you still have to take a unique user ID and have an endpoint (i.e. target for the tracking data). We're keen to implement xAPI tracking in the near future and have been chatting to the guys from Brightcookie about collaboration on an extension for Adapt.

So, in summary, you can either implement tracking yourself, connect onto (and maybe modify) 'Spoor' or wait for / contribute to the xAPI implementation. Hopefully this gives you at least a starting point.

Let us know what you get up to and keep the questions coming!

Sven

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Hi Sven,

That's a great starting point. Seems to me that implementing LMS like tracking is more complicated than i thought.

I'll study more about SCORM and Adapt, thanks a lot for your help!

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Hey Erik,

Adding something into the core folder would suggest you're not using the internal events system. We've built Adapt to have a pluggable core that enables Plugins/Extensions to tap into core and retrieve/update data.

We're in the process of creating some documentation about getting to know core.

To help guide you along the way please take a look at the following documentation:

Adapt API

This is a detailed overview of the Adapt object you can require in an extension. It should give you all the handy information you require to manipulate data.

https://github.com/adaptlearning/adapt_framework/wiki/Adapt-API

Core Events

You should be using the events system in Adapt. Here you'll find all the useful information and list of events Adapt passes out.

https://github.com/adaptlearning/adapt_framework/wiki/Core-Events

Core Modules

This details all the core modules inside Adapt. This includes the Router, Drawer and Notify.

https://github.com/adaptlearning/adapt_framework/wiki/Core-modules

This should give you a starting point to creating an Extension. I'd suggest looking at something like adapt-contrib-resources for the structure and how to setup the events.

In terms of developing in Adapt, Extensions are the most complex to write - so if you're just starting out, we suggest writing a component first to get use to the way Adapt works.