The problems we see in the education space today are the same ones we’ve been witnessing for the past 20 years – limited development resources, poor use of existing content, compromised learner access, and an inability to gain insight into a student’s interaction with learning material. dominKnow Learning Systems is one of the very few organizations that focuses hard on all these areas.
Providing an integrated suite of tools and processes that support collaborative content creation, dominKnow allows educators to easily create, share, and re-use content across any number of projects – for use in-class, on-line, or as student reference material. Teachers can fully leverage the effort they (and their colleagues) have put into creating learning material, students can access it in multiple ways depending on the time of need, and everyone can gain insight into what content is being accessed and how.
dominKnow: Content Authoring and Publishing for Teams
dominKnow Learning Systems is a content authoring and publishing solutions provider that believes, people don’t just build learning content and forget about it. They feel strongly that it’s all about creating and sharing great learning experiences – and then maximizing that content’s use and value in as many ways possible.
They know that a lot of material developed in the educational space is stuck in inflexible pages, trapped in traditional formal learning vehicles like eLearning courses or classroom presentations. As a result, learning content (and the time and effort that goes into creating it) is often poorly leveraged.
Their cloud-based content authoring and publishing platform allows educators to collaboratively gather, design, create, share, reuse, deliver and measure content that can be used to help students at multiple times of need – from formal through to just-in-time learning.
Luke Hickey: Passionate about Technology
Luke Hickey, CEO, dominKnow has almost two decades of experience in the Software and Information Technology industry. Luke asserts, “we are a learning company that builds software and training solutions, as opposed to a software company that builds products to develop learning content.”
Luke shares that dominKnow’s strengths are built upon their experience – both as continuous learners and as educational content creators. Their passion as learners means their instructional and system design philosophies place the student at the center of the learning experience, while their long history as content developers has taught them the “power of many”, and how to best leverage collaboration, sharing, and content re-use in the learning content design process.
Leveraging Technology
There’s been a rush for authoring tool vendors to get on the responsive content bandwagon. That’s great news for those wanting to develop material that can be accessed on multiple devices and used in multiple ways, but Luke and his team know that all responsive tools are not created equal.
Most authoring tool vendors enforce a dumbed-down approach to learning content development. Templates, fill-in-the-blank, or block-based tools help get stuff out the door and meet the responsive check-box, but they often don’t satisfy the learning need.
Luke and his team’s approach is to allow for all the same powerful, rich content development they are known for while providing an intelligent content authoring framework with dynamic themes and components that take care of the underlying details. This “true responsive” methodology allows educators to build rich learning experiences without worrying about specific devices or multiple versions of the same content.
Supporting xAPI Standard
Luke believes that from a measurement point of view, the emergence of xAPI is a very exciting development for the educational space. xAPI is an open specification for learning technology that makes it possible to collect data about the wide range of learning experiences a student has – both in and outside the classroom. This student-centric approach to learning analytics will be increasingly important as forward thinking teachers continue to deploy varied learning strategies (online, classroom, apps, chatrooms, etc.). “With xAPI integration, teachers, students, and parents will be able to access metrics related to content access and interaction that will allow them to measure and assess its effectiveness,” Luke asserts.
Latest version of the dominKnow Platform
dominKnow has recently launched their latest version of the dominKnow Platform – with major advances in single-source, multi-use content authoring and the ability to measure content interactions using xAPI. They have focused on new enhancements, however, they didn’t lose sight of the importance of a powerful but simplified authoring experience. Towards that end, this latest release of the dominKnow Platform continues to flesh out their robust offering of rich templates, stock images and characters, responsive pre-made components, buttons and gauges, built-in actions, and a large integrated asset library that educators can add to and share as they develop their own learning experiences.
The history (and current state) of learning technologies is full of horror stories about costly investments in proprietary technologies that lock up content and make it unusable beyond its initial purpose. Since its inception, dominKnow has focused on industry standards. They encourage educational institutions to eschew propriety technologies and look for vendor neutral, standards-based platforms. In the end they will own their content and be able to re-use and re-purpose it freely – both today and tomorrow.