Looking Back At 2021: A Year of Milestones At dominKnow

Like everyone around the world, the dominKnow team spent 2021 dealing with the ups and downs dealt by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Despite those challenges, we managed to achieve some pretty awesome milestones last year.

I’m amazed, really, by what our team was able to accomplish! Here are the highlights.

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Happy 10th Anniversary, Claro!

In April we celebrated the 10th anniversary of the launch of Claro.

Claro was the fifth generation of our Learning Content Management System (LCMS). And although it was rooted in decade of predecessor versions it was truly something new, so we gave it a new product name.

Back in 2011 Claro marked the introduction of a whole new authoring capability to our traditional LCMS.

It also marked the launch of one of the first all-HTML5 author options in the elearning industry, giving our clients a great solution for providing content accessible to the burgeoning realm of mobile devices. A decade later, some elearning teams are still dealing with the death of Flash – but our clients left those worries behind a long time ago.

In the decade since Claro was launched we have continued to innovate and improve on what it offers. In 2016 we added our responsive content authoring option, Flow, and in 2018 we brought both authoring options together in dominKnow | ONE. There is no other elearning authoring tool set that provides so much value all in one place (“one” place – see what I did there?)

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Welcome to the World, dominKnow | ONE 7.4!

In June we celebrated the 7.4 release of dominKnow | ONE. And what a release it was!

The list of new features in this release was massive. In fact, it was our biggest release since the initial roll-out of dominKnow | ONE.

Here are a few feature highlights:

• Three new question types
• Five new interactive exercises
• Full-site search for Pages, Questions and Learning Objects
• Saving Flow Sections and Claro Layers as Favorites

What we’re most proud of, though, is the sheer number of improvements made to the authoring interface itself. Our team really focused on making it simpler for new authors to get started in the tool and helping experienced authors work even more efficiently.

Leading the list of interface improvements was our innovative approach to adding inline help to almost every authoring feature in the tool.

Every element you add to a page in either Claro or Flow includes a Help button which opens related content – lessons, articles and more – from our Community site right within dominKnow | ONE. New authors can easily start to learn as soon as they start making their first content page. We also added a more-obvious Help panel to the interface as well, with links to a range of resources in the Community site to help authors get started.

Other interface changes make working in dominKnow | ONE faster and easier overall:

• Our new Element Controls give authors easy access to options, controls and more for any element selected on the page
• A new Add to Your Page workflow means authors can build pages quicker than ever before
• New panels for the Review process and for Comments help authors quickly set up, track and resolve feedback issues
• A new Share button makes it quick and easy to publish your Project
• A new Authors button helps you track and assign Authors for collaboration on a Project
• A revised profile panel helps authors access their Profile as well as switch between Essentials and Designer mode as they work.

And these are just the highlights – the full list of new features and feature improvements in the 7.4 release is huge.

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And Welcome to the World dominKnow | ONE 7.4.2.!

And if all that 7.4 feature release goodness wasn’t enough, we snuck an extra round of feature gifts into dominKnow | ONE just in time for the holiday season in December.

Our 7.4.2 feature release added three new Question page options, plus improvements to:

• Labels on hotspot questions
• Narration within components like tabsets
• Our PowerPoint import process

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Raise a Mug to Some Amazing IDIDOC Milestones

In 2021 we completed the second half of season four and, in September, started season five of Instructional Designers in Offices Drinking Coffee, or IDIODC as we affectionately call it.

Our Community Manager Brent Schlenker and I hosted 42 new episodes this past year for a total of 172 episodes since we started nearly four years ago.

We continue to be amazed at how the learning and development community at large embraces the weekly live sessions, not to mention the video recordings available on YouTube and Vimio and the audio versions available on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify and pretty much everywhere else folks get their podcasts.

In August we were blown away to realize we had reached an incredible milestone of 100,000 total downloads of the audio podcasts, and by the end of the year that had grown to 115,000 total downloads.

Halfway through 2021 we started an IDIODC LinkedIn Group, and it now has more than 700 members.

Brent and I are really honored to have the opportunity to raise a mug with amazing guests every week and to help share their ideas and expertise with the learning and development community at large.

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And Here’s to Turning Twenty Five in 2022!

Hard to believe, but in 2022, dominKnow will celebrate its 25th anniversary.

We started out making off-the-shelf elearning on CD-ROMs and now we help global organizations create and deliver their own amazing elearning content.

We have, as we like to say, a history of innovation.

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We’ll definitely be celebrating our 25th anniversary milestone in 2022.

We’ll also be looking ahead, continuing to improve dominKnow | ONE and also, well, stayed tuned for our other plans for the year.

In the meantime, you can get a better sense of what dominKnow | ONE is all about by signing up for a free trial.