Hi Sarah,

welcome and thanks for joining and posting your questions. Please see some quick responses below:

The two sides of the project: Framework and Authoring Tool

There are indeed two parts of the overall software being developed here - but they are slightly different to how you've described them.

• The Framework is the functionality / feature set, which is part of the output of the tool and runs in the browser, when learners launch courses built in Adapt. For example, this includes menu, navigation, tracking and a host of interactions (presentation and questions components) such as Multiple Choice Questions etc. You can work directly with the framework to hand build courses, if you have sufficient technical skills (editing JSON files and working with HTML and CSS in particular). If you want to customise the behaviour, you'll also need JavaScript skills.
• The Authoring Tool is essentially the data input software, which offers a graphical user interface (GUI) to build the course. This essentially takes away the need to hand build as described above and is therefore aimed at people who would describe themselves as non-technical (as you do).

As far as the specification of the output (i.e. the published courses) goes, there is a detailed description on this page and shows what can be done with the Adapt Framework version 2.0, which is what our latest release of the authoring tool (version 0.1.2) uses.

- The Authoring tool is ready to go in terms of a number of functions, however is still being built for total customisation. (Q- Does anyone have a complete list of functions already available?)

I hope that part of the answer to this question is contained in the link to the description and spec of the Adapt Framework v2.0.

However, as you say, the authoring tool is not fully built at this stage and there are some functions, which have not yet been fully developed. I have provided a list of previous release notes to help you find out what has been built so far:

• Tool v0.1.0 release notes
• Tool v0.1.1 release notes
• Tool v0.1.2 release notes

(I think it might make sense for us to summarise these into a page on what's covered and possible, which we'll keep up to date. I'll talk to the team about this on our regular stand-up tomorrow)

- The frame work side is where the community is working to assist and test in development for the Auth tool. ( Q- If we were to move forward with this and ask our IT team to assist us with the coding and development could they customise our end of the framework side to allow for our requirements?)

Please see the explanation above, which explains the relationship between the framework and the authoring tool. In summary, you can either use the framework directly to build courses or use the authoring tool (which then uses the framework for you).

It would be great to have your IT team involved. We're always keen to get people to help us implement our roadmap. As for incorporating your requirements, there are multiple avenues. It all starts by defining and communicating these requirements to the project. Most often they're aligned with what the project wants to achieve and if so, your team could work closely together with the core team (or even become part of the core team) to implement them. As and where your requirements differ and are not suitable for the generic Adapt product, you can always "fork" parts of the code and develop and maintain alternative parts of the code. There is a lot of freedom with the GPL 3.0 license. I'd say it's well worth checking with the Adapt team in the first instance as most requirements tend to align quite well.

Hopefully this is a helpful initial answer!

Thanks and best regards,
Sven

Hi Sarah,

I am also looking at options for my organisation. 

I am curious as to whether your organisation went ahead with Adapt.  If so, would you be willing to share a little about your experience please?

Thanks and regards

Phil