Understanding the various building blocks of Adaptive Content Authoring, how they interact with each other, and how you can move them around is key to building a good course.
Below you'll find an explanation of how Adaptive Content Authoring is structured and how you can navigate it.
The sidebar
The sidebar is largely visible throughout . It lays out the structure of your course and allows you to navigate it:
There are three main sections in the sidebar:
- Introduction
- Course content
- Conclusion
Introduction
The introduction contains the title screen and can contain slides (see below for more information about slides). There is also an optional Warm Up section that you can enable.
Title screen
Every course has a title screen:
The title screen can be found at the top of the INTRODUCTION section of the sidebar:
Click here to read about theming your title screen.
Warm up
The warm up section asks the user a few questions to gauge their current level of understanding of the content. Their responses are used to dictate what content the user is shown later on in the course.
To enable the warm up screen and add questions to it, click Warm Up in the sidebar and toggle the switch to enabled:
Course content
The course content section contains the bulk of the course. The content is organized into and made up of four components:
- Categories (folder icon)
- Topics (book icon)
- Slides (slide icon)
- Activities (lightning bolt icon)
The different components can be dragged and dropped to reorder them in the sidebar:
Categories
Categories are the highest-level grouping of content. They act as ‘chapters’ in the book that is your course. Categories can contain topics, activities, and slides:
When learners complete the introduction of your course, they'll be taken to the category page:
Click here to read about creating categories.
Topics
Each topic represents a goal or a learning objective for your learners. For each topic, learners are required to prove proficiency by passing at least one activity. For that reason, each topic must contain at least one activity. We recommend no more than four topics in each category - just to keep the size of each category manageable!
By default, the topics within a category aren't shown in order. Activities from each topic are presented at random, so learners may see an activity related to Topic 2 before Topic 1.
Topics can also be configured to only be shown to certain users. Click here to read more about branching content.
Activities
Activities are clickable interactions that allow learners to apply what they’ve learned:
To read more about all the different types of activity and how they're configured, click here.
Slides
A slide is a page that presents information without any interactive features. There are several varieties of slide that include different types and combinations of media, e.g. text, image, video, and audio:
To read more about all the different types of slides and how they're configured, click here.