Adapt Learning Community: Some really basic questions....sorry :)

Hi there,

We are very enthusiastic about Adapt coming down the pipeline.

And we're really looking forward to the authoring tool coming - thanks for getting this out before year end!

I have some really 101 questions about Adapt. Apologies for their simplicity!:

1. Once the authoring tool comes out, will it be a case of installing the authoring tool and the framework on your local computer (e.g. like a standard software installation). You then use the software to create your courses and then export them to use in a SCORM compliant LMS, like Moodle?

2. Is there a simple list/screen-grab of all the different assessment options currently available? I'm assuming that there will be some plugins paid/unpaid that people put together that you can use with Adapt?

3. In terms of video, will it be possible for users in a course to watch a video hosted externally on Vimeo/YouTube but that you view on the course page.

4. Likewise, I assume people will be able to clink on hyperlinks and the web page opens in another page on their browser.

Thanks so much.

Hi Ryan,

great to hear you're excited and please do keep these questions coming. They are all valid and relevant. Answers below:

We're building the Adapt authoring tool as a server-based tool (i.e. much like Moodle). We plan to host a free version via the community (I have faith we can somehow cover the costs of hosting) but anyone can take the code and install it on a server themselves - we'll supply instructions and documentation and there is support via the community site here.

Later on down the line, we (the Adapt Learning project) expect and encourage service providers to run professional (and likely charged for) services (hosting, support, training and other value add services) using the free codebase. This should make it easier for non-techs to access Adapt and still get their contracts etc.

On that note, the framework and tool will stay free and will be continue to be provided under the GPL license as they are today.

You can also run local installations on your machine if you like and if you are the only user of the tool. In the requirements doc, we are outlining the vision around collaboration etc, which would really only work when running it from a proper web server. Hope this makes sense.

To answer a later part of the question first: All plug-ins will be free - given the license agreement, non-one has the right to create plug-ins and charge for them as most of them will (by nature) be derivative code of the Adapt codebase.

As to a list of assessment options: All question components will work in an assessment. The easiest way of seeing what they are is by looking at the most recent v1.1 demo and choosing the question section from the menu. There is a registry of all components here. We are still working on a public web page to show this in a visual and searchable way.

I'll let Paul Welch or others answer the other two questions.

Hope this helps!
Sven

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Hi Ryan,

I’ll pick up where Sven left off.

2. We'll also be releasing some more advanced assessment/randomised bank functionality after the release of version 1.2 of the framework. This will allow for:

questions to be presented in a randomised order
banks of questions. The number of questions in a given bank and the number taken at random for inclusion in an assessment is configurable
points 1 and 2 to be combined

We’re also exploring the creation of diffuse assessments that allow assessment to occur throughout a course, rather than in a separate final assessment. Once this is complete it will also be released into the community for use.

3. Yes, it’s possible to do this (we’ve streamed video from YouTube into Adapt pages for a few of the projects here at Kineo). We’ll be making this plugin available to the community, again, post the release of v1.2.

4. Yes, links to other pages can be either placed within the page content or located with the resources feature which allows you to categorise and sort links to documents, videos or webpages.

Hope that helps,

Paul

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Thanks for your replies Sven and Paul. All perfectly clear to me now - much appreciated. Keep up the good work!

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I would like to butt in here:

Will it be possible with Adapt to create different learning paths? I.e. that content is being displayed in dependency of previous options chosen by the user? So that user A who claims X will be shown other content than user B who claims Y?

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Hi Nicola,

We have created functionality similar to this before, albeit in an earlier incarnation of Adapt. Unfortunately this extension wouldn’t work with the open source code as it was created before the code was refactored. If a requirement comes up for Kineo to create something like this again we would certainly look to make it available to the community and I’m sure the other collaborators would do the same. Alternatively, if there is a strong demand for something like this then we could look to add it to the roadmap. For the record, the functionality we had created previously was a role selector which would change or remove content from pages depending on a choice made on the part of the learner (their job role). It was a complex extension that required a fair amount of effort to create (2-3 weeks from memory). Of course, someone could choose to create this for themselves as a community extension. If anyone is interest drop me a line and I’d be more than happy to share the thinking that has already been done on the pre-open source version.

I also think there is an opportunity for us to look at developing functionality that supports adaptive content – content that changes depending on the choices the learner makes. The most obviously example of this would be presenting more complex or simple content depending on how we’ll they are answering questions. I’m beginning to dip my toe into this side of things and I’m keen to continue exploring these ideas. For example, we’ve just developed an assessment approach internally (using Adapt) which measures how well the learner has answered the knowledge check questions throughout the content pages. We then take this information and create a tailored final assessment that asks them more questions on their weaker subjects and less on the subjects where they have demonstrated an acceptable level of comprehension of the subject.

Hope this is helpful,

Paul

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Hey Paul!

Thanks for your thoughts which are helpful as they show, that there are other people around who might be in need of this feature.

Unfortunately there is no way, that I could develop an extension myself.

At the moment I am considering to develop an psychological online self-help program. I suppose that e-learning platforms might be a good tool for this. However adaptive content is a crucial feature. Moodle does offer this, but I am not completely happy with Moodle...

So I would really appreciate it, if there was a feature for adaptive content in the near future.

Other features I would like to see (and am not sure if implemented yet):

User management (it should be possible to create user accounts, users would then be able to enrol for a course)
Variable usage (User answers a question, and this answer would then act as a variable. This way one could include the answer of a user within other text blocks or questions)

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Hi Nick,

thank you very much for your feedback - great to get your input and I hope that Adapt will work for your program.

I wanted to add two items:

Variable usage:

This exists with the 'linked open text input' component at: https://github.com/lc-petranussdorfer/adapt-contrib-linkedOpenTextInput - at least this should get you some way there.

User Management:

For now, we are focused on creating a "creation" tool for e-learning rather than a "delivery" tool. Our authoring tool will therefore not include features such as launching and tracking e-learning, user and enrolment management, which you might see in Moodle or other LMSs / VLEs etc.

There are quite a few open source alternatives to Moodle and - if you are not concerned with tracking user progress, most web based content management systems would probably suit your needs, too. (here is an overwhelming CMS list, here is a slightly more helpful CMS comparison)

Hope this is helpful - all the best,

Sven

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Hi Sven!

Thank you for your input! I will have a look at the links you posted!

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