Adapt Learning Community: Authoring tool: Concept and vision

Adapt Authoring Concept and Vision DRAFT.pdf

Adapt Authoring Concept and Vision DRAFT.docx

Hi,

as promised, here is the concept document with explanations. Apologies for the delay. Posting on the community site as I think it needs discussion before it can become official documentation.

Ryan, Tony and Paul, I'm keen to discuss this with you. Apologies also for the delay in reviewing and engaging with the architecture and MVP documentation you have already created. I expect to do this next.

Thanks
Sven

Thank you for sharing this Sven. As a potential consumer of this I like how thorough this is and seems to cover the potential uses I have been thinking of.

One thought that occurred to me while reading this, is that as I understand it, the current concept of a course maps out to one scorm package or output file.

It might be good to have one level of hierarchy above that, ie: a 'project' that consists of multiple output packages. For example our average 'course' is actually composed of 6-8 SCORM packages. Our largest one contains 26...
Having a way to group these together in some way would help with organization.

I also have some additional thoughts about nice to have features but this is likely too early of a stage to be making feature requests so I will file them away for now.

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Hi,

I think that requirement got captured during our initial user story gathering workshop. One of the ideas was that we would use labels or tags and attach them to a course. Quite like the way you can tag/label email in gmail. So each course could have multiple labels allowing you the flexibility to group the same course multiple different ways.

I think that gives you what you need in a slightly different way, but with a little more flexibility.

If you can think of a better way to do it let us know, it hasn't been developed yet so it's not too late

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Hi Mathew,

Thanks for your comments!

Please don't hold back with the wish list. This document and discussion are very much about the direction of travel and ultimate goals. In summary, it paints the bigger picture and we will attempt to pick the essentials in the minimum viable product (MVP), which will be a very cut down version of what's in the diagram initially but grow overt time.

The benefit of becoming aware of future items is that we can make design and architectural decisions now, which make accommodating these items later on much easier. It's also very important for us to be guided by our (potential) end users needs. Therefore, please feel free and encouraged to post your ideas up here.

Regarding projects:

It's great to hear a good reason for creating projects. We have been mulling this over and been struggling with the term (language) to use and their purpose. It's good to hear a good reason for including them.

I wonder if there is some overlap with the folder structure, as this also deals with organisation. If you were able to create folders or categories (and subcategories), would this answer your requirement for organising the individual output packages? Or do you envisage needing further functionality around a 'project' as such?

Thanks
Sven

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Thank you Sven and Mark. It sounds like either the tags or folders idea could cover this.

One other thing in our regular workflow is updating/making changes to courses, either to update broken links or update them with some new clinical information, etc.

Part of the challenge with this is that one 'module' of a course can be used in multiple courses also, potentially with some tweaks around the intro/welcome page. We've been reducing the differences in content on the welcome page to make our SCORM packages more modular, so we can drop them in where needed, but it is still sometimes a challenge to remember this module is used in projects a,b,c and with some changes in project d.

I think being able to assign multiple tags to projects and also search/filter by tags would help with managing this complexity better than folder structures would. Or just have a 'folder' view that uses the tag names as folders.

One other struggle here is versioning of assets. It might be outside the scope of the asset management, but it would be very nice to be able to upload a new version of an asset to replace an existing one and have it auto-replaced in all the instances it is used in, and also to be able to roll back as needed.

One final wish would be a global search function, across all text content in courses. Again, helping with fixing those broken links that may be broken in more than one place or searching for some piece of content you may not be sure which course it is in.

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Hi Mathew,

Thanks for adding these thoughts.

On the tags, our thinking has been exactly what you have described as 'folder view', i.e. the tags display as folder names and showing the courses that have been tagged accordingly. The main benefit is that courses can 'live' and be used in multiple places. We still have to dive in the detail of this as that can bring its own issues (i.e. the intention to edit in the one place but not others etc).

On asset management, we were very much thinking about reuse and simplifying the update process. As you say, it should be possible to replace an asset and for this action to flag which courses need to be re-published. I'm not sure this will be part of the scope of the MVP deliverable but is certainly on the roadmap.

'Search' request duly noted. I can see this makes a lot of sense!

Sven

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Thanks Sven for sharing this. Helps out to see it all summarized in this concise format and consider the various aspects.

A few things that came to mind while reading through it:

First of all, things I particularly like and I think are important to pay attention to at this initial planning and infrastructure stage, and some ideas or question regarding the described functionality:

Multi-tenancy - opens lots of interesting uses mostly as service delivery. I think a good ideas is to look at how Wordpress has evolved with MU and now allowing single installs to manage multiple blogs with plugins install at top level or for individual instances. Not sure all of it applies to ADAPT but good to consider the strategies that eveloved.
Dashboards - perhaps consider the possibility of various dashboards for various roles, or the ability for a user to customize their dashboard to include the data and visualization that is most relevant to them
Language for system and content. Are we thinking of the possibility of a single output package including more than one language allowing the viewer to choose the language they want to go through OR for the content editor to create multiple packages, one for each language? Or perhaps both options?
Plugins - I notice there are plugin types. Are we considering also plugins to extend the admin functionality - e.g. themes for admin UI (not just output themes) as in Drupal, workflow plugins (to add/modify workflow steps)

A few things I'm not sure where it fits in:

Assets libraries - ability to include/add/create/provision asset libraries or repositories that can be used by various roles and/or tenants. Ability to categorize according to asset type (e.g. video, image, animation...) and tag them, and allow search/browse assets
Plan stage - I see mentioned no specific functionality is planned for this stage for now. Can we consider plan templates to be possible, e.g. load a pre-prepared plan for reuse, to streamline/standardize planning?
In-system help - how do we plan to address that? Options could be tooltips text, lightbox with texts and/or image/short video, JQuery Joyride type tours, etc.

Thanks,

Amir

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I like the asset library idea - but I'd suggest that instead of trying to create something ourselves it would be better to hook into an existing OSS asset library e.g. Resource Space and/or make an API to allow developers to hook in others as needed.

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Presently, we are aiming to have an Asset Manager that provides upload, search, categorisation and (very) basic editing capabilities. Our FileStorage subsystem is pluggable, however, and we expect plugins will be written to provide support for external repositories such as Amazon S3. I'm not yet familiar with Resource Space, but it should be possible to write a plugin to support it.

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Hi Amir,

Thank you for the great input here. I’m hoping to get to create a requirements log over the next few weeks and will make sure to drop these items in. I have picked out a few items and responded here:

Are we thinking of the possibility of a single output package including more than one language allowing the viewer to choose the language they want to go through?

This is a particular question we are still debating and I will open up a separate thread with a direct question to the community.

Plugins - Are we considering also plugins to extend the admin functionality?

Yes, we are. The ones that come to mind straight away are:

Themes
Languages
Workflow steps
Publishing processors (e.g. ‘publish to…’ integration points + output formats)

Plan stage - Can we consider plan templates to be possible, e.g. load a pre-prepared plan for reuse, to streamline/standardize planning?

By that, do you essentially mean bringing in a default document (which contains a plan in whatever format)? If not, please could you elaborate?

System help - how do we plan to address that?

Very good question and one we have to address. In order to create an easy to use tool, I think we will certainly need to produce context sensitive help and think abut how else we can really support the end users.

Thanks again - I hope this makes sense and starts answering some of the questions!

Sven

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Thanks Sven for your responses - they do make sense and indeed are quite promising.

As for the plan templates what I meant was that perhaps we could have people prepare (and perhaps share by export/import) templates for types of content or uses. That would include a high level design of the structure of pages and articles, that could speed up design of similar content.

So, for example, if you wanted to create 20 or more short modules on similar products, you could use or create a plan template for such modules, and load those templates every time you want to do a module based on that template.

Does that make sense?

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I'd like to second this, templates are very very useful for us and would be a very important feature. This also goes in hand with the ability to copy/duplicate an existing course so you don't have to start from scratch each time.

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I would like to third this.... templates are a really useful tool.

I like the idea of creating a template course that you can use when you want to create a certain type of course.

Another really useful tool is to be able to copy content between courses. If you have a chapter or a page in a course and you realize that in this other course you need to do something really similar. Being able to copy parts of a course into another and then just edit the content makes for much quicker authoring.

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Thanks, Amir, Mathew and Martin.

Great to get such a clear steer on this being important. I'll include it in the requirements list for the overall vision. The next step is then to draft up a one-pager around the functionality and get your input. This may take a little while but I am keen to do that and run it past you to help flesh the idea out. Hope that's ok.

Sven

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