Now You Know Blog

Craig Weiss over at the E-Learning 24/7 blog recently took a look at the rapid content authoring tool market, spotting several trends in the directions many tools are moving.

Craig’s list of observations is quite detailed, and we were pleasantly surprised at just how many of the “red hot” features he identifies are already taken care of in Claro.

Here’s a sampling:

• Templates – Checkmark for Claro. (More than a hundred, actually)
• Assessment/Surveys/Polls – Assessments are a definite Checkmark for Claro., as it has a lot of neat flexibility and, frankly, power in this area. One of the interesting things we’ve found, though, is that most of our users already have surveys and (to a lesser extent) polling in place through their LMS tools. So from an authoring tool perspective, a big question is do you build redundant functionality – and if so, does that mean your clients now need to go to two different places to pull up reports, data, etc.?
• PowerPoint – Checkmark for Claro. Craig identifies this as an expected feature, but also rails against it for the poor learning design decisions it so often encourages people to make. We hear, you Craig.
• Peer review – Checkmark for Claro.
• Mobile with tablets - Checkmark for Claro. Make one course in Claro, and it works equally well in traditional browsers like Internet Explorer and in Safari on the iPad, for example.

What really caught our eye, though, was the number of “red hots” that Craig rails against – and how Claro doesn’t have any checkmarks in these categories:

• Flash Output – Not for Claro, which publishes HTML5-compliant courses that also have “graceful degradation” built in. This means one course works for the iPad as well as older versions of I.E.
• Lack of easy to use – Well, for this item (which Craig rightly says he’s “stunned” by) it’s definitely not a checkmark for Claro. Claro really is easy to use, folks. No issues here.
• Proprietary – Claro’s is standards compliant in all directions – SCORM, AICC, PENS. And our content publishing in HTML5 also means that we’re not creating content in a proprietary format, either – very important reassurance for Claro users as they look to the future.
• Desktop – Since Claro is web-based, elearning teams can work together whether they’re in the same building or spread across different time zones.

Hey, if any of this sounds intriguing to you and you happen to be in Las Vegas this week for the ASTD TechKnowledge 2012 Conference and Expo, be sure to check in with the dominKnow team at booth 203, or even join us for our presentation Getting it Right for Every Device: Mobile Content Authoring in a Post Flash World in the expo hall at 12:20 pm on Thursday, Jan. 26.

And we’re always glad to show off how “red hot” Claro is, so if you aren’t at the conference, just use the Contact Us form on our website to, well, contact us!

Chris Van Wingerden is Vice President Learning Solutions at dominKnow Learning Systems.