Adapt Learning Community: Adapt for Microlearning

Hello! First of all, thanks to those who have been helpful (Chuck Lorenz, especially).

I'm still getting started in Adapt, going through the source code and understanding how we might utilize it in our organization. I am in discussions with some other team members to develop some microlearning around a big organizational learning initiative. An early idea is to have a schedule, and each segment (5-minutes) of the training would be rolled out every two weeks.

I'm considering mentioning Adapt to my team for this, but I want to get some community thoughts on whether this would be a good tool for the application I'm talking about. My thought would be that we would have five main topics introduced on the main course page. Topics not yet covered would be greyed-out and unviewable. Within each topic, we would have a component or two added every two weeks until we've unfurled all the content.

Potentially, this might sit in our LMS. If a user follows along from the beginning, their progress will be retained whenever they come back to the course. If a user starts it later on, they have access to all previously-introduced content. Eventually, they would complete the training and receive a completion in the LMS (assuming we do deliver via the LMS) but not until all topics have been viewed.

As I type this, it's sounding more like this would be a good approach to take. Does anyone have thoughts on this, or some potential pitfalls to my strategy that Adapt might pose? Is there a way I can have content in the course but not reveal it until later?

Thanks all!

Arend Raifsnider

Hi Arend,

I'm not an Adapt expert and others who've used it will probably correct me, but here are my thoughts.

(1) I'm not sure of how to deliver Adapt courses if not through an LMS. Perhaps you could use something like WordPress or sme other form of website, but I'm not sure what the advsntage would be.

(2) Hiding and releasing parts of a course on a schedule seems more of an LMS function than one that would be part of Adapt. In my mind the LMS houses the course(s), each of which is made up of smaller chunks (lessons/modules/topics/units) which could be developed using Adapt.

Thinking micro is great but you may want to permit individuals more choice over which components to bundle together and in what order to complete your chunks unless they are all starting with the same level of prior knowledge or it's critical that everyone compete all components. Otherwise waiting to see what's there after a number of pieces have been released, rather than working through modules sequentially as they come out, may benefit those who want to personalize. Some people resent not being able to look ahead, while others like just having one short piece to do and then they don't hsve to thonk about this suff until the next release. You may want to poll to find out how your users feel about this.

-Sue

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Hi Sue,

Thanks for responding!

After I posted that comment, I discovered the Trickle extension. Perhaps that could be used to hide parts of the course that are not released yet.

We've built some eLearning in Storyline that should give the learners a basic foundation. Since it's a big organizational push, the idea is that the microlearning would compliment what's already been released.

The other way to do this, of course, is to just utilize our internal social network and incorporate infographics or videos and release them bi-weekly. What I was thinking with Adapt was that it would a) allow us to track results, b) allow us to utilize some nice components like the accordion, and c) be responsive.

Arend

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It will be interesting to see what you and your team end up doing, You're right about the accordion, and and I like the side-by-side component arrangement as well.

At this point in my own work, I'm inclined to try to figure out what functions each tool or system handles best and how to knit them together. Otherwise I'll spend so much time figuring out tools, I'll never get to the course development. My goal is to end up with a collection of apps that can be used on any device and either online or off. Also, I want to end up with packages made with tools (or parts of them) that other non-techies like myself can reuse and recombine to meet their own needs.

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Arend,

Trickle doesn't include that functionality out of the box. But since it's open source, seems you could code it to check javascript date/time before it checks the completion status of blocks. Still means you have to all portions of the course in place before you load it into the LMS.

Chuck

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Hi Arend

Sorry for the slow reply, I actually wrote a reply last night but my browser crashed after clicking 'Post' *sobs*

There's nothing like this in Adapt at the moment but it is something that has been talked about by designers here at Kineo as an option.

One thing that you'll want to think about - where do you get the current date/time from? The standard/easiest method is just to use JavaScript, which essentially means you are retrieving it from the user's PC. This means they have the ability to 'fast-forward' time by changing their computer clock... If you're not bothered about them doing that, fine. If you are - you will instead need to retrieve the time from a server instead.

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Responding to Chuck and Matt here.

Thanks for answering guys! You both seem to get my concept, so that's good. I think the time would probably be drawn from our LMS, where the course would be stored. I have a coder on my team now who knows javascript, so I'm going to chat with her about the idea later this week. I'll get back to you on it.

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Just bear in mind that, unless your LMS server happens to run node.js, you'll need more than just JavaScript to be able to get the time from the server. What language you do need depends on what the server is capable of running i.e. PHP, Java, .NET etc.

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Good to know. We'll have to interface with our LMS team as well, then. Thanks Matt!

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