Adapt Learning Community: FEATURES OF ADAPT AUTHORING TOOL FOR RESPONSIVE ELEARNING DEVELOPMENT

With the evolution of devices from desktop to laptop and the ubiquitous mobile phones and tablets, the way people interact has changed completely. Elearning authoring tools have also evolved, brought in changes to add multi-device support and responsive output. Some of the currently available, popular authoring tools are Adapt, Evolve, Elucidat, GOMO, etc.

Though there is a wide gamut of authoring tools available, it has to be kept in mind that no two content authoring tools will work the same way. Some programs are geared towards beginners (novice level with no programming experience) who want rapid elearning development and take advantage of pre-existing templates. Whereas others target advanced users (Expert level with programming experience) who want highly customized content.

In this blog we are going to look at the features of Adapt authoring tool:

Adapt is an open source project targeted towards novice level and Expert level users developed by Adapt community. For customized content or layouts, you need to be familiar with Web technologies like HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Adapt acts as an authoring tool, as well as a framework that has a reusable codebase for developing single page responsive courses. Adapt also boasts of an interface for novices who can easily author courses without having to fiddle around with the source code.

Features of Adapt:

Unique Structure:
Adapt has a unique “single page application” structure which reduces the number of HTTP requests to the server which would drastically bring down the load time of the pages.

Design:
It’s “mobile first” design approach that allows the users to keep scrolling the mobile to view content in a page, thereby giving a continuous visual flow down in a page.

Configurable:
The flexibility in providing configurable styles for layouts, styling and functionality, makes Adapt a very attractive and powerful content authoring tool.

Output:
Adapt output would work perfectly well across all modern browsers and operating systems like Android, iOS and Windows. The course output is HTML5 which is supported by all latest browsers. The HTML5 content is styled and made interactive using other programming languages like Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript. A framework like Adapt helps developers create a responsive experience by giving them the necessary tools to create a single piece of content for multiple devices.

Plug-ins:
Adapt is completely extendable through plug-ins and is built on a modular structure. You can add your own plug-ins and add them easily in to the framework or the authoring tool. There are four types of plug-ins which are Components, Extensions, Menus, and Themes.

Navigation:
Adapt allows you to define the flow of the content. It provide four types of locking on menu pages: sequential, unlockFirst, lockLast, and custom.

Sequential – The first menu item will be enabled and the subsequent item will be displayed.
UnlockFirst – The first menu item and the following items will be disabled.
lockLast – All menu items will be enable except the last one.
Custom – You can define the criteria to unlock menu items (ex: You can define that the user must complete menu items two and four to unlock menu item five)

Better course management:
Adapt also helps to create copies of course, so you can create new course based on the existing ones. Adapt courses can be well structured and could be used to define the flow of the content.

Publishing standard:
Adapt courses can be published in SCORM 1.2 standard.

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