Adapt Learning Community: Fedback from users and 10 features they want next!

Feedback from Adapt Builder users

I’ve been lucky to spend some time with more than 100 Adapt users at 2 events we ran in the last week in Leeds and London. It’s always great to spend time with actual end users of products you’ve been involved in building and as always I learned a huge amount. I thought I’d share some of the feedback here since many of the people on this forum have been responsible for building various bits of Adapt:

There is a real sense of excitement in Adapt from the end user community. Users are taking the opportunity presented by Adapt to rebuild vast parts of what they do with e-learning in general and the flexibility that Adapt is giving them is allowing them to really up the game
More users than ever are building their own content using Adapt Builder. This is at odds with many of my previous experiences which was that enterprise users would be slow to adopt new approaches but Adapt seems to present the opportunity to change this which is great
Users are getting up to speed really quickly with Adapt Builder and building some great e-learning content really quickly using the tool

Of course there’s always an appetite for more and I’ve come back with a list of requirements as long as my arm. I think the list below is a good and up to date list of requirements from a representative sample of Adapt users so I thought my top 10 was worth sharing too:

Branching scenarios delivered at a component level and buildable / editable in the builder
Improved assessment functionality
Improved hot graphic editing in the builder – the users I’ve spoken to are struggling with this
Ordering and rating component
Version control in the builder
Better menuing options
Automatic publish to an LMS
Extended capability around themes
Gamification – I think that means leaderboards, points collection and possibly some sort of extension to integrate with Open Badges
Workflow that enables subject matter experts to comment on modules as they are being built

All of the above will feed into our development plans @learningpool over the next few months and no doubt Mark and the team will work with the contributing community to make some of this happen. It was great to meet some of the people on the forums face to face too and here’s hoping we can build on the momentum we’ve started.

Happy to hear comments on any of the above

Paul

Wow, great feedback - thanks Paul.

I'll let others comment on the other parts, but automatic publish to LMS should be possible if we implement PENS support. Obviously only works with PENS-compliant Learning Management Systems though - but this is the standard for doing this.

Oh, and the assessment plugin has had quite a re-write in v2

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1,6,8 & 9 are on my to-do list already. Glad we're on the right track.

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Hi Paul,

Thanks for sharing and glad the Learning Pool events went well. Just to elaborate on the points made by Matt and Oli regarding the framework.

Version 2.0 of the framework will offer improved assessment features including banks, randomisation, support for multiple assessments within a course and an improved results screen with graduated feedback. In addition there is additional functionality to support advanced revision features that will be made available as an extension post release of V 2.0.

Version 2.0 will also offer significant improvements in the theme, with a more coherent and logical structure with more usable defaults, all of which will make it easier to start working with the base theme so you can personalise a theme. In addition there are also more variables on offer allowing you to do more with a theme.

As Oli says, branching and gamification plugins are on Kineo’s internal roadmap for development and these will be made available as soon as its complete. Kineo will also be making two additional menu’s Hot Spot and Cover Flow available to coincide with release of 2.0 (they are already available on repo but they need testing with the beta due to release in the coming few weeks).

You can add Open Badges to Adapt courses without a plugin but we’ve got something on the Adapt roadmap that would allow you to make this easier (adding meta data and a graphic). I’m planning on updating the roadmap, post release of 2.0 to share with the community the types of things we’re proposing next (Tin Can API, interactive video, further assessment improvements, learner dashboard and so on). I’ll touch base with Mark and other collaborators to ensure we’re not duplicating effort and to agree priorities.

With regards to ordering and rating be great to hear from the community how they would like these components to work. I’ve seen the video and slider component combined to good effect to achieve a rating type interaction. Be happy to see if I can upload a video showing an example. I’ll see if I can also find some examples of ordering to help generate some discussion.

Thanks,
Paul

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Thank you for feeding this back, Paul (McE). We've recently had a stand up with the core Adapt team where we discussed the major roadmap items and what we're aiming for with the 0.2 release and beyond. We're working on writing this up and publishing it to the community (likely after we have the Framework v2.0 release out of the way).

Some of the items you mention are already on the roadmap and some other ones may need unpacking a little further, e.g. gamification. I suggest we use the Responsive eLearning forum to discuss how people are approaching this now and get ideas on what the community are looking for.

Thanks,
Sven

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Hi Sven,

I think post the updated roadmap that we both outline, having discussion on the forums about the detail is a good idea.

Particularly where we're talking a grouping of functionality that can be combined to achieve something such as games/gamification.

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It's great to hear feedback directly from users, and nice to see that Adapt is making an impact.

I'd be really keen for us to set up some way for the community to post feature requests for both the authoring tool and the framework (perhaps as a poll on this site), and for others to vote for said features.

I think we're definitely in need of a more interactive project roadmap to guide the development of Adapt, and do so in a way that benefits everyone using it.

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I agree, Tom. The buzz that is building around the Adapt project is very exciting to witness.

I think your interactive roadmap idea is excellent - the engagement from everyone here on this forum has been fantastic so far, and that would be a great way for the development team to reciprocate.

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Two of the things i'm definitely after with respect to the assessment are an actual results screen (like an additional article, not a band overlay), and the ability to prevent a user from proceeding to the next question until the current question is answered correctly. Glad to see randomizing questions is on the roadmap, as that's another requirement we have. Additionally i've been looking for a way to apply the trickle extension on the block level rather than article level - occasionally we have multiple choice questions in our courses interspersed with other content and would like to use the trickle extension to halt progress until the question is answered.

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Hi Stephen,

The new results functionality I outlined is delivered via a component and this can be positioned within a new article.

The trickle extension that is scheduled for inclusion within the core bundle for 2.0 can be added to the block to allow you to control the manner in which content is made available to a learner, including assessments.

The extension is configurable and i’ve seen it most often used to:

lock scrolling so that a block requires completion before the next one is presented
break up a long scrolling pages by adding a continue button between blocks
unlock a block containing questions and autoscroll it into view once the preceding question has been attempted. An example of this can be seen in the example below between 0.59 and 1.35.

At present, trickle cannot be used to control scrolling based on whether a question is correct. This is something we're looking at as it's great for learn/apply type learning models as shown around the 1.05 mark.

Here the page scrolls if question is correct and if incorrect a block slider is used to move some remedial tutorial content into view (triggering the block slider also resets the question ready for attempt 2 ready for when the learner returns to the block containing the slider and question combination).

Hope the above info is helpful and what we have lined up for release provides the functionality that you need.

Paul

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If you were to set a question to have an infinite number of attempts then you would be able use trickle to prevent the user from going to the next question until the current one is answered correctly - if that's what you want, thought it sounds more like you just want to present the next question once the current one has been answered.

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Well the client's assessments in the past pre-adapt days would not allow you to proceed to the next question without getting the current question correct, so it sounds like setting something like 999 attempts might do the trick, i'll test it out and see what happens.

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It looks like setting the attempts to be greater than the number of choices works perfectly.

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