Adapt Learning Community: Adapt at Community Colleges

Hello all!

I am an instructional designer at one of the largest community colleges in the Southeastern U.S. I have recently stumbled on Adapt and I am hopeful that it could come to replace one of the authoring tools we currently use. We are working as an institution towards using more open source resources, and I want to focus a current benchmarking project on using Adapt in our online curriculum creation.

The problem is that I'm having trouble finding other, comparable public institutions that are using Adapt. If anyone can offer any info on any schools that may be using Adapt, or individual faculty members or designers who are making great content with Adapt, I would be so grateful.

Thanks!

Lauren

Do these institutions need to be US-based?

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Hi Matt,

No; I'm interested in any college or university that is currently using Adapt.

Thanks!

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I've definitely seen a few people here from Bristol, Cambridge and (I think) Nottingham universities.

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Yeah, it seems to be a lot more popular there than in the States.

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Hi Lauren, I'm a US-based freelance developer who builds Adapt content. And if you hop onto the gitter group (https://gitter.im/adaptlearning/adapt_framework) you'll find other US-based developers. Most of my US clients are corporate entities, some quite large. Despite the fact that Adapt requires no licensing fees, and despite how well it does with accessibility and responsiveness, I have never been approached by a K-20 institution. My guess is that the level of technical expertise required doesn't jive with existing instructional design shops built around the SCORM authorware model. It's too bad because it's a great framework and future-forward. And it offers the kind of reliability I would be looking for if I were an educator or educational administrator. For example, the last content package I built was for an international corporation. According to my client's statistics, 55,000 people in several different countries took the training. My client has never delivered training content built with Adapt before. Only 70 failed to complete because of some sort of technical difficulty (which may not have been content- or SCORM-related).

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Hi Amy,

Thanks so much for your post. And yes! The accessibility and responsiveness were the first things that really caught my attention. As a publicly funded institutions, we are bound by the ADA and all of our content has to be accessible.

I think you're onto something with the technical expertise necessary being an issue, and I've been lucky enough to have found a group in our ITS department who worked to install the software on my work computer, which is windows based, and to also sign-on to build an in-house support team, which I know our faculty will need.

We currently use Blackboard as our LMS, and last year we had 16,000 students take at least one online class, with curriculum education online FTE at 5,613, so your 55,000 is making me feel confident.

I'll forward the Gitter group link to my IT team. Thanks again!

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Lauren,

If you don't need a lot of complicated plugins, and you have an IT team that can provide some hosting and support tasks, then I would have a look at the authoring tool: https://www.adaptlearning.org/index.php/adapt-authoring-tool/

I don't know how well it scales to, say, 100 or 200 instructors. The Auth tool devs would know more about that. But it should allow multiple non-technical users to create content using a single theme and a set of approved plugins.

All best,

Amy

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Thanks! And yes; IT put the authoring tool on my work computer and I've been messing around with it a bit and working on a lesson. It's pretty easy to use, but I can see how if this is something I want our faculty to use, who are not always the most tech savvy, I'll probably have to write an in-house manual for them. I'm still trying to learn more about the plug-ins and everything the platform can do.

Thanks again, Amy!

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Hi Lauren,

I'm from King's College London in (surprise!) London, UK, and our e-learning team has been using Adapt for the past couple of years. We host it ourselves, and have in the past had a web developer who was focused on building plugins, themes and extensions for us.

While Adapt worked well in many ways, we are now moving away from it: the university as a whole did not support adapt, and that has meant that our faculty don't have access, and that means the e-learning team has had to make all updates and edits to each lesson, which then needs to be downloaded, uploaded into our VLE, and then tested again. It's become a sustainability nightmare, which is unfortunately, because we've had such great feedback from students.

Happy to speak more about our experiences!

Louise
Instructional Technology Manager, King's Online
King's College London
louise.bennett@kcl.ac.uk

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Hi Louise,

Thank you so much for your comment. This is exactly the sort of information I'm looking for. So you're saying that faculty were not building their own lessons with Adapt because they didn't have access to the authoring tool? So any changes to the lessons had to be done by the e-learning team?! I can understand how that could quickly become unsustainable.

I would love to hear more about your experience, both good and bad, using Adapt. I've had so much trouble finding any colleges or universities here in the States that use it.

Thank you again!

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