King's Online launched two years ago and was looking for the correct eLearning Authoring Tool. We wanted a tool that we could make our own to ensure that we had an innovative learning experience for our online students.

1. Creating an e-Learning Authoring Tool for HE
Simon Date (@simondate) – King’s College London

2. 2 | King’s Online
Higher education is going online
30% of HE students in the US study at least partly online, 15% fully. *
We are living in global world where by changing mentality and developing technology the place you are in matters
less and less. Studying online is a real option for those who want to study part time in their evenings without having to
relocate to another city or country for it’s university.
As a part of the vision 2029 statement King’s College London highlighted our intention to become one of the leading
Russell group members in this area. It was clear that a serious investment was needed to establish ourselves in
emerging market.
* Page 11, Distance Education Enrollment Report 2017, http://digitallearningcompass.org/

4. 4 | King’s Online
King’s Online
Supporting the development of Online programs with department and faculties
In response King’s College London decided to setup Kings Online, an Instructional design and development team
dedicated to the creation of fully online distance learning courses (we also do Moocs!).
Initially a team of around six people in two years we have grown to a team of over forty instructional designers,
project managers, content developers and other specialized roles.
Our management team established relationship with the universities faculties that would be interested in having
courses and began researching how we could deliver the best experience for their students.

5. 5 | King’s Online
We want a quality experience for students
Just using Moodle isn’t enough to delight students
Early on it was decided that the activities our Moodle LMS provided wouldn't be enough to create the premium
courses that we felt that our students deserved.
• Our LMS was slow and not very responsive
• Limited interactions reduced student attention
• Couldn’t easily style courses to match the art direction of the marketing materials.
• Our students are 100% online. Wanted separate experience for iLessons
Conversations with IT showed that we weren’t going to be able to have an alternative LMS. It was clear that we
needed to adopt an eLearning authoring tool that could create beautiful looking courses with meaningful interactions
that can enhance student engagement.

6. 6 | King’s Online
The Authoring Tool Market
Supporting the development of Online programs with department and faculties
The e-Learning Authoring tool market is segmented into two groups. The old school incumbents of Captivate and
Storyline are rectangle based and not very responsive.
These tools are being replaced by newer cloud based tools which can be used through the browser without installing
software and produce output that can work on both desktop and mobile devices. However they are propriety tools.
You have to pay a license fee for every content author that you have. If you made the wrong bet on the Authoring tool
supplier you loose all your content.
Our head of Instructional Design and Development Fabio Serenelli, was convinced that an open source suite of tools
would be able to serve our team in our desire to scale.

7. 7 | King’s Online
Adapt Learning
Free as in cost. Freedom as in innovation.
Our team discovered Adapt, an open source authoring tool. It’s based on new technology as such it’s fully responsive
HTML 5 content that works on any device you throw at it. As it is open source it could be scaled at no cost to us. It’s
supported by some of the biggest eLearning companies in the UK including Kineo, Learning Pool and Sponge UK.
Adapt has a plugin architecture that allows for new extensions or components to be created by anyone and dropped
into a course.
Innovation is no longer controlled by your software vendor but is in the hands of your team.

8. 8 | King’s Online
Meet the R&D team
New hires to create a platform for innovation in learning
Paul Gillary,
Learning Technologist
Simon Date,
Web Developer
Rachel Brown,
Web Designer
Janek Zavatski,
Web Designer
Louise Bennett,
Instructional Technology Manager
We installed Adapt on our own server so our production team had access to it. We setup a new web design and
developer team, focused on reimaging learning experience and producing visual design excellence for our courses.
We are the innovators supporting the production team about four times the size.
We created our King’s Online Github organization, www.github.com/kingsonline. We started installing 3rd party
plugins and creating our own. To date we’ve created 35 repos. 11 of which have been open sourced!

9. 9 | King’s Online
Adapt Meetup London
Using College infrastructure to gain community influence
Adapt has a Gitter chatroom where developers can discuss projects and have more informal chats. There was some
light discussion about the idea of an Adapt meetup and I pitched it to my managers as a great opportunity for us. The
majority of the Adapt development team is based in the UK and being a well known institution with hosting spaces in
central London I thought King’s would have great potential as hosts and a chance for us to make an impression on
the Adapt community.
We were given the go ahead from Adapt and in January 2017 hosted over 100 developers and end users at the
Adapt Meetup London. We gave a talk about why we wanted to use a Adapt and what we wanted to build in 2017.

10. 10 | King’s Online
Image placeholder Our talk highlighted how we felt like Authoring Tools
had focused too much on the needs of the corporate
learner and the needs of the student learner had been
second fiddle. We wanted to create an elearning
experience for our higher education students.
After the event we sat down as a team and created a
roadmap of the extension and components that we
wanted to create through the rest of 2017 to meet this
goal.
We used Trello to maintain this and ensure it’s
viewable and influenceable by anyone in KO.
Innovating for students

11. King’s Online 2018 theme
12 month effort to modify Adapt for students

12. 12 | King’s Online
Image placeholder One of the issues we felt that we should try to address
is the feeling of online student feeling isolated from
each other.
Our courses have some group activities that mandate
peer interaction but we wanted to encourage more
casual interactions.
We were inspired by seeing students of our Moocs
interact with each other. We felt that this is a feature
that we should bring back into our managed programs.
We use Moodle forums but as it’s launched from Adapt
we can use JS to apply CSS to the page. Stripping all
it’s functionality apart from the discussion forum to
ensure the student has a focused experience.
Social

13. 13 | King’s Online
Image placeholder We had taken elearning courses before that had been
restrictive about navigating them. This is due to the
mentaility of elearning that it’s to do with Corporate
learners who are being required to complete their
mandatory elearning so their employee can tick a box
or fufill it’s auditing requests.
We wanted to create learning materials that respected
our students time and let them get to the part where
they wanted to be. We reimagined navigation in Adapt
using influence from modern web design standards
including Google’s Material Design.
Students always have information about where they
are in the current page with the highlighting feature as
well as the rest of the course.
Contents

14. 14 | King’s Online
Image placeholder
Google Analytics
We realised that if we wanted our decisions to be
correct and impactful they should be influenced by real
data from our end users.
We created a Google Analytics plugin. That tracked
interactions like when they used plugins that we had
added or enabled as well as course completion etc.

15. 15 | King’s Online
Image placeholder Academics had always insisted in this feature and we
had created a parallel PDF with all the content
manually copied across.
We looked into various solutions and eventually
decided just offering a print page button seemed the
simplest and most elegant.
According to our Google Analytics this feature has
been used by a majority of our students. Putting my
assumptions to shame.
University students clearly want to be able to annotate
and engage with content in a level much deeper than a
traditional eLearning learner.
Print page

16. 16 | King’s Online
All topped off with great visual design

17. 17 | King’s Online
And the next 12 months?
More innovation but improving the production experience too
We have many plans for Adapt in 2018 and going forward. Firstly we’ve applied to become project collaborators,
having our contribution being officially recognized and giving us greater control over the future development of the
project.
We want to further our practice of using student feedback to influence our development. We are planning on running
a classroom session with campus (King’s offline) students. In the next few months.
We have a few more plugins kicking around but they main focus we want to improve is the experience and speed of
content authoring. We’ve already managed to automate a lot of the processes that go into making an eLearning
course and we think these can be improved further.

18. Thank you!
Demo and questions

19. 19 | King’s Online
Demo and questions
Demo:
https://adapt.iddkingsonline.com
Follow us:
Github: https://github.com/kingsonline
Twitter: @KingsOnline
Website: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/study/online/index.aspx
Follow me:
Twitter: @simondate
Linkedin: Simon Date
Email: simon.date@kcl.ac.uk
Website: https://simondate.github.io