Indico e-learning

What we already have

  • One introductory and one advanced course taught in classrooms
  • MkDocs documentation page at indico.docs.cern.ch
  • Short videos in Edutech

Why we needed to change that

  • Sometimes there weren’t many participants
  • Some students felt the course they selected was irrelevant/too easy
  • Courses happened only a couple of times per year, students had to wait
  • Always nice to have a refresher course any time at hand
  • COVID-19 era

What does CERN offer for e-learning?

Learning Management System (LMS)

  • An application for the delivery of educational content
  • Can track progress, manage courses, include assessments
  • Compatible with SCORM and other technical standards to create courses

Articulate Storyline 3

  • CERN training team holds an (expensive) Articulate Storyline 3 licence
  • Can create SCORM-compliant courses that can later be imported in LMS
  • Can only be used by the team holding the licence
  • Restricts our freedom in terms of creativity and flexibility

The open-source alternative

AdaptLearning Framework

We experimented with AdaptLearning Framework because:

  • it is an open source tool that
  • it can create SCORM-compliant courses.

AdaptLearning Framework advantages

  • Full control of the course creation
  • Modern and fully customizable UI (single page apps)
  • A seemingly active community
  • Easy to integrate with our existing MkDocs files
  • Additional plugins and themes
  • Uses .json files to build SCORM

From MkDocs to Adapt

In order to avoid re-writing the entire course manually we created a script that converts the contents written in MkDocs .md format to Adapt .json files.

mkdocs.yml

components.json

Example course

LMS

Thank you

Also many thanks to everyone who helped and contributed in this project:
Erwin Mosselmans, Maria Dimou, Pedro Ferreira, Adrian Monnich as well as the indico and technical training teams!