HI
Lets use this thread to collate ideas on design functionality within Adapt. This includes functionality that may aid early instructional design, through to features, interactivity and visual design on the page.
Design Discussion
Re: Design Discussion
Hello Alistair
Great to see the two threads of discussion around workflow and design being separated out here - I certainly appreciate you channelling my thinking in these directions. Thank you! There are a number of comments I am keen to make around potential functionality that will support novice IDs with creating effective content and ensuring we build in enough opportunities for more experienced IDs to really extend the possibilities presented by the various component types available.
I will get back to this on Monday - apologies for the annoyingly slow responses, I'm just on the road a lot this week! Looking forward to taking these conversations further with everyone.
Deborah
Re: Design Discussion
Hi Alistair,
I'd be keen to share some ideas here, coming from a development background and working closely with the instructional design team I feel I might be able to add something, or might be able to recruit some of our instructional designers to feed into this discussion.
Could you give us a few examples of the type of thing you are thinking here to get the ball rolling?
Regards
Alan
Re: Design Discussion
Alan,
I just joined the community....always late to parties... ;-)
I'm really keen to be involved in shaping the ID approach that will act as the input to Adapt e-learning courses.
Looking forward to seeing what it can do!
John
Re: Design Discussion
Welcome, John! And thanks for the introductions thread - great idea.
A good starting point may be for you to have a look at these two documents. They're not complete yet but the diagrams give you an overview of the overall aim of what we're producing.
Adapt Framework Concept (WIP)
Thanks,
Sven
Re: Design Discussion
Apologies if this is the wrong place for this question but I couldn't find anywhere specific for it. My question is: As adapt is rendered server side will it be possible to run courses in a disconnected environment?
I ask because we have recently had to provide a course which worked both in connected and completely un connected environments (Council Waste tips and mobile vans both often without even great cell reception). This is also relevant where we are doing executive level courses and people want to use mobile devices on trains and planes plus many customers just don't have wireless or network cabling everywhere.
Re: Design Discussion
Hi Chris, thanks for raising this. I've attempted an explanation below:
Once the authoring tool is in place, Adapt will be the system with which you create e-learning content, rather than the system which then delivers the content to the end users. In other words, once the content has been created using the authoring tool, it is then published, which will mean exporting and downloading a packaged SCORM module or similar format.
The published content (e.g. SCORM module) will then need to be uploaded to another system, which can host and deliver it - these systems are often called learning management systems (LMSs), virtual learning environments (VLEs) etc and it is their job to tackle the 'running of the course' (i.e. the scenario you describe above) and also the offline delivery aspect if that is required.
The published content you will get out of the Adapt Authoring tool is capable of being delivered offline (e.g. downloaded to a mobile device or laptop and 'played back'). It does not require any server side functionality. However, handling the delivery of the output in general / offline is the responsibility of another system. Example LMSs are Moodle, Sakai, Docebo and proprietary equivalents.
I hope this helps - please feel free to ask any further questions.
Re: Design Discussion
HI
I knew there would be an overlap between the Workflow and Design threads, and I've just added a comment to the Workflow one about a system role for an ID with a couple of ideas, but for those of you who get involved at those stages of a project it would be good to hear where you think Adapt could benefit from ID functionality.Within that I include the scripting stage also.
A challenge with many projects is at the design and scripting stage, typically with lots of versions of Word documents flying around, when there are multiple stakeholders, SME's not familiar with elearning design and where they have to make that mental leap from words on a page to how it translates to an interactive course. I'd like to see some useful tools included that allow for simple wireframing of a course structure with place-holder that has a sophisticated notes/comments feature to really help that connection between script and build.
I like the way Storyline works - to an extent - in that you can create a hi-level Story view and you can add notes against a screen, although just notes that can be included in the published course. I think if you had that sort of story view with an easy way of adding attributable, versioned comments, , which can be reviewed/edited by other users, stored as Meta data along with the actual content as it develops, this would be great. This would not only be useful at the ID / Client engagement level but also the ID / Developer level further down the road.
Re: Design Discussion
Hi Sven it took me a while to get back to this and I must have expressed myself very badly. Having specified two LMS and provided courses to work with all of the major ones via SCORM AICC and a variety of custom interfaces I'm not a stranger to that side of the equation.
What I was referring to was Adapts ability to be differently displayed on different systems. My initial read of the spec was that the delivery of the content to the display device was responsive on the server side (post launch by the LMS) i.e. course pages were being served up something like an ASPX page being built to deliver a page specific to the user based on their device/browser capability. Is it in fact the browsers rendering of the HTML (and presumably JavaScript) that is different based on the browser/display device? If so, does this mean that if the course is downloaded onto a mobile device for offline playback it would have to download all the content even that which wouldn't get displayed because of the device capabilities?
As background I am looking at Adapt as our next generation course authoring system to replace out our proprietary Flash based system. Our courses are currently in a very traditional screen by screen form (yes with a next button) and very heavy on audio and video. I am looking to convert these and perhaps extend them but also to be able to move to a more web-like experience for future courses. The other upsides I am hoping for are a) to allow our customers an edit facility so they can modify courses themselves and b) to allow for easier translation into other languages.
Thanks for responding.
Re: Design Discussion
Hi Chris,
thanks for the clarification and apologies, I misunderstood your original question.
Adapt does display differently according to device and browser capabilities. This is all done on the client side, i.e. via JavaScript in the browser. Once an e-learning module has been published via the authoring tool (or compiled manually), there are no scripts that run on the server side.
This means that all content (independent of which devices the content is aimed at) will be contained in the SCORM package. When online, we use conditional loading, so only the relevant resources for the user experience in their device/browser are downloaded and displayed. As and when the course package is downloaded for offline use, the entire package, including content that wouldn't get displayed, would (need to) be downloaded and be stored on the local device. At this point, I don't really see a way around this as the only alternative would probably be to publish multiple versions. In summary, unless you published multiple versions, you'd be downloading more than you need for offline play.
However, in our experience, the audio and video files, which make up most of the bulk of the e-learning module in terms of file size, are often quite suitable for consumption on mobile devices (presuming that the file type is suitable for playback and the content can be seen well enough on the smaller screens). The technical guys can say more about which file formats we are working with that work well across devices.
In response to your other points, the authoring tool (once fully built) will enable you to assign editing capabilities to your customers and also cover import / export facilities (and hopefully more) with regards to language translation.
I am currently working on a concept overview document, which will outline the vision of the authoring tool in more detail and hope to be able to complete this task this week. This document will cover items for our first deliverable as well as roadmap items. We will follow this up with a definition of our first version of the product. Hopefully, this will give you a good idea as to what we are aiming for.
I hope this makes sense and answers your questions. Please don't hesitate to ask any further ones.
Sven