Adapt Learning Community: Custom titles in Page Level Progress drawer

I didn't want to post this as an issue until I/others have done further testing, but the following seems apparent to me:

There appears to be no way to use a custom title solely for PLP; it will always take the object's 'Title', which means courses built with the framework presumably can't have clear, logical 'Titles' such as 'a-01', 'b-10' or 'c-20' if PLP is to be used, because 'a-01' would appear in the PLP drawer.

This is an issue if the author wants to have a unique Title, Display Title and PLP title for one Article or Block.

As previously stated, I didn't want to raise this as an issue yet as I may have missed an available setting in the AT or framework.

Might not exact what you are looking for, but in most of our modules we do not add a Display title for articles and sometimes blocks, or we use different wording in Title and Display title. That way PLP shows what we want. We do work in AAT I should say.

Show parent | Reply

The title and displayTitle properties are intended to hold the same value, it's just that title should not contain any formatting.

I don't understand why you'd want to have "'Titles' such as 'a-01', 'b-10' or 'c-20'"...? Perhaps you could elaborate a bit more on that?

Show parent | Reply

I guess I've always thought of these two properties as offering certain flexibility when it benefits the author.

For example, let's say the first Block of a course contains the Learning Objectives. It might be beneficial for a visitor to the course in the authoring tool (e.g. someone editing or reviewing the build) to see "Learning Objectives" at the top of the Block, for quicker reference, so giving the Block a title value of "Learning Objectives". However, for the front end, the author wants this Block's displayTitle value to be "What you'll learn".

As for 'a-01' etc., I noticed during my first build in the framework that these were the default title values used in the template - which made sense to me as it made it easier to navigate and match parent and child objects. But if you exported this template with its default title values (a-01 etc.), and you wanted to use Page Level Progress, wouldn't these short values then appear in the PLP drawer?

I suspect the above might not be very clear, but my point isn't easy to explain without demos etc. (and maybe it's something only I've noticed / would have an issue with).

Show parent | Reply

It might be beneficial for a visitor to the course in the authoring tool (e.g. someone editing or reviewing the build) to see "Learning Objectives" at the top of the Block

I agree that this sounds very useful l but since it's something specific to the authoring tool it should be handled differently i.e. you wouldn't want this text to be exported into the course JSON files.

I noticed during my first build in the framework that these were the default title values used in the template

This originates from the CSVeat tool which lets you set up your course structure in Excel. And which Kineo course builders use to set up Adapt courses, including the demo course that's in the Framework repo. Note that they're only left in place for articles/blocks (which never get shown in the PLP) or for components that are not shown in PLP.

Show parent | Reply

Thanks Matt. I'm still getting a feel for what works best for me in terms of structuring courses: which features to enable/disable etc., so it'll just take continued experimentation and testing.

I'd be interested in knowing your opinion/preference for whether to have Article-level or Block-level headings. It's an ongoing cause of confusion and debate where I work. I suppose ultimately it comes down to how the theme has been developed.

What do you find works best?

Show parent | Reply

I think we (as in: Kineo) mainly use article titles together with the articleBlockSlider extension. Outside of that use-case I'd guess that block titles are the more used of the two - but still not commonly used here, we tend to just stick with page and component titles.

Like you say it ultimately comes down to how the theme has been developed... as our main area of work is bespoke elearning, every client (and sometimes every project) tends to be quite different for us!

If it's helpful, you might also like to know about these tools for developing Adapt courses:

https://github.com/cgkineo/adapt-devtools
https://github.com/tomgreenfield/adapt-inspector
https://github.com/cgkineo/rub-cli

Show parent | Reply

Great, thanks. I'll give those tools a try.

Show parent | Reply