Why are we doing it?

We want to establish the Adapt Learning community site as the ‘go to’ destination for any instructional designer/course builder who wants to find current best practice and industry leading thinking on not just Adapt, but all responsive elearning design.

What is our most basic goal?

Our initial goal will be to ensure that early adopters of the authoring tool have enough support on the ‘go live’ day to avoid any sense of frustration in getting the tool to work. We also want to be able to demonstrate that there is an active community of learning professionals on hand to provide support. 

Sven made an interesting comment at the last steering group meeting about Moore's Chasm in the technology adoption lifecycle and the challenges this poses the open source project.  We believe that if we are to bridge that chasm we'll need to provide a collection of useful training resources to get people 'up and running', as well as being available to offer advice and guidance on a case by case basis. This may initially take the form of technical/installation advice but we should also be prepared to offer more around general design with Adapt/the tool (see below). We'll also be looking to the community and will be keen to take up offers of help (particularly with testing and documentation).

How will we achieve this goal?

Create a basic demo that has been built using the authoring tool along with some elementary tutorial content on how to build your own version of this simple course. In addition to the tutorials we’ll also provide some ‘Master class’ videos on how to install the authoring tool and get up and running with it.  These tutorials and videos will continue to be released as the authoring tool functionality increase with later releases so does the volume of training content, ensuring an up to date syllabus of ‘How to’ content is matched to evolving authoring tool demo.

What other training content will be available?

We’ll look to provide advice and guidance on instructional design theory and practice, as well as more specific guidance on working with Adapt:

• Instructional design 101 – Get the basics of good course design
• Designing for multiple devices – A more advance course on designing for different devices
• Working with the scrolling page – explore the challenges and opportunities offered by the scrolling page

In addition to instructional design theory we’ll also explore more project management and commercial areas as well, such as:

• Working with technical teams to ensure you can serve up Adapt content (asking the right questions at the right time)
• Making the case for multi-device to clients and internal stakeholders to ensure we maximise adoption opportunities
• Process for developing multi-device content
• Establishing a shared language of design for Adapt content
• ‘Guest speakers’ where we hear views and opinions from related disciplines about working with Adapt and how good design can make their lives easier. For example testing department on designing and testing a technical prototype before building out a full course

We’ll also want to research what’s going on in other related digital communities and debate and discuss any emerging theories, design approaches and technical developments with a view on how they might inform better Adapt course design.

What about sharing best practice?

We’re keen that people can share their work in a gallery of courses built in Adapt; this would take the form of two categories:

• one for courses built with the authoring tool. It's important that we clearly group these examples showing which version of the tool was used to create the example of content as this shows what's possible with a given release. It also allows us to show what's going to be possible with 'sneak previews' of new functionality in the upcoming releases.
• one fore courses built 'by hand' just using the framework

These shared examples might take the form of entire course being made available, however I suspect some challenges here due to client confidentiality, so instead it may be more appropriate and in fact more useful to adopt the following approaches:

• ‘Look what we did!’ videos where designers post narrated screen capture video where they describe the design thinking behind the course design and how the brief was met and any challenges were overcome
• ‘Play books’ – designers share how they’ve used a particular combination of components to solve a particular challenge
• ‘Top tips’ – informal hints and tips on achieving great results

We’d also like to open up an area on the site for graphic design discussions, perhaps around both theme creation and general art direction.

We would also aim to standardise the format of all the learning materials produced, regardless of where who produced them or for what purpose. This will help make them easier to create and more useful for the end user. We would also like to explore standardising other key documents used in Adapt course production to help novices follow best practice and to make it easier to form effective partnerships between course creators.

What will do we do to ensure success?

Make sure that the collaborators are actively contributing and creating a lively forum for debate before the authoring tool is made available, as well as dedicating enough resource to help create really useful collateral. We’ll also follow the ‘house rules’ of the forum and keep things welcoming, courteous and supportive at all times.

We’ll probably need to explore whether we can have a bit of a redesign for the community site to make the support on offer a little easier to find. We’d also like to explore the possibility of making more interactive elements such as polls a feature of the site, for example voting on what functionality is developed next for the authoring tool or what plugin would people like to see next.

I’d also recommend that the those involved in the creation of collateral follow the weekly stand-up approach employed by the technical side of the project to ensure we establish and maintain impetus and steer a course on which we all agree.

We use Jira to capture, allocate and manage the necessary tasks involved in creating all of the above