Background:

In my current role I have taken the opportunity to re-shape our entire course development process, opening up previously un-tapped resource by creating a team of 8 course developers. I achieved this using an authoring tool called “Adapt”, a free, open source authoring tool that, once setup, enables staff with limited e-learning development experience to create their own, fully responsive courses, which would work on any device.

What did this project deliver?

Previously all course development had been done using more traditional authoring tools, which required a certain level of expertise, which in turn limited the amount of internal development resource available. I spotted an opportunity to enhance our development capability – and was keen to investigate new technology as part of a solution to this.

I installed the Adapt authoring tool on our company server, customised it by building a bespoke theme to match our brand guidelines, which involved editing the code (HTML / CSS / LESS) directly.

I then built several example courses to demonstrate the power and capability Adapt offered. One of these demo courses is shown below, which demonstrates the responsive nature of Adapt courses. It uses the freely available assets provided by Adapt and the community, including the Adapt website theme, which I installed for this specific demo.

Click on the picture below to view an example of an Adapt course:

Click on the image to access an example course

Note 1 – My custom theme referred to above is protected IP so is not included in this example.
Note 2 – I believe all these assets are in the public domain as part of freely available open source software – if you have any questions on this please get in touch.

What job roles did I perform during this project?

• E-learning manager / project manager – Personally overseeing and completing the setup, installation, customisation and development of the platform.
• Trainer – As part of this project I have trained 8 staff members on the Adapt authoring tool so far, and I provide ongoing support.
• Instructional Designer – Creating a series of example and demo courses to prove the concept and aid the training
• E-learning Developer – building the actual content within the authoring tool from scratch, and testing it in SCORM cloud, and across a range of devices and browsers
• Moodle Developer (using our Moodle platform I created courses, resources, web pages and other components of the course where the SCORM packages were hosted, alongside a full testing process)

What software did I use?

• Adapt authoring tool
• Code editor / Dev Tools – For creating the custom theme
• SCORM Cloud – for testing SCORM output
• Adobe Photoshop / Adobe Illustrator – to edit in course graphics
• Home use only – Github, Gitbash, NodeJS, Grunt, Adapt CLI, MongoDB – all required for home installation on my own server

Who did I work with?

This was a solo project, I did much of the work in my own time, and everything was self taught. For this project my colleagues were:

• Software Development Manager – to arrange the server installation
• Team of Education staff – I trained on course creation in the Adapt Authoring Tool

How this was achieved:

Having previously used more traditional and common place authoring tools such as Storyline and Captivate, I was looking to learn something new. I’d heard about the open source platform “Adapt”, I was keen to get involved and try it out for myself, and evaluate it’s potential to be used by non-technical colleagues who didn’t necessarily have any background in e-learning development.

Having set up and installed the authoring tool at home, I spent time teaching myself how it worked, the course development process, editing code to customise the theme, and how I would potentially introduce it at my company.

I worked closely with our Software Development Manager to arrange the installation on the company server. As I had already completed this process at home, I was able to advise on key issues and speed up the process.

I then got to work on creating a custom theme. Whilst I had edited HTML and CSS in the past, I had not used the LESS pre-processer before, and various other parts of the code were new to me. This is the kind of project I enjoy digging into – researching and learning along the way! I successfully built a theme to match brand guidelines, which was signed off by marketing and formed the basis of the design for our courses.

Once this was complete, I was able to move onto training a team of course developers! Various colleagues had expressed an interest in learning to build courses themselves – and were really receptive to the idea. I trained 8 staff in total, concentrating on specific elements according to their skills and experience. To support the training and ongoing enhancements, I built a wiki which would define certain processes in Adapt, and also allow all staff to contribute to the content and support each other.

What was the outcome?

Our course development resource and capability has grown significantly. Originally, we only had 1-2 staff who had the required skills to develop e-learning courses. I now have 8 course developers trained who can produce their own content, largely unaided. This has resulted in a huge increase in the volume of content produced, and the development time of course material.

As I write this, there is a whole series of courses about to be released that have been built by this team, and it is really satisfying to see the content they are producing, the consistent, responsive design, and how it all works flawlessly on a range of devices.

What did I learn from the project?

This has been a fantastic learning opportunity, as I’ve learned so much about Adapt, how it works and it’s potential. I’ve really enjoyed the process, and would encourage others to get involved in Adapt, to see how it could help them.

I am looking forward to the future – where I can learn more about getting the most out of Adapt, experiment with plugins to further expand our capabilities, and continue to increase people’s awareness of this free open source tool.

I would be happy to answer any questions you have on this project or any other featured on this site – just get in touch! Please take a look at the rest of my portfolio…

Cheers

Jon