Based in Canada’s capital, Ottawa, dominKnow is a cloud-based eLearning authoring tool provider that believes you don’t just build learning content and forget about it. The organization feels 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. For two decades, dominKnow has been creating eLearning software for small teams and large organizations. During this timeframe, the company has developed Learning Content Management Systems, online authoring platforms, and formal and informal learning products used across almost all sectors of business and government.
The Steadfast Leader
With extensive experience in the software and information technology industry, Luke Hickey is the CEO of dominKnow. According to his philosophy, dominKnow is a learning company that builds software and training solutions, as opposed to a software company that builds products to develop learning content. Thanks to this approach, and Luke’s passionate pursuit of product excellence, the education industry has a content authoring and publishing platform specifically designed to meet their unique challenges. This, combined with Luke’s insistence that all of dominKnow’s content authoring and publishing tools be built using an open protocol, standards-based approach, means that educators have viable solution that will serve them both today and tomorrow.
An Organization with Learner-Centric Approach
dominKnow’s existence of more than twenty years in the business and its ‘learner-centric’ approach to tools development makes the organization distinctively unique across the space.
With a combination of powerful features and simplicity-of-use, dominKnow’s content authoring and publishing platform, dominKnow One, can compete with different classes of tools — from enterprise level learning content management systems to singleuser desktops solutions. Organizations get the best of both worlds, the power of a cloud-based Learning Content Management System (LCMS) for both managing and delivering large amounts of content, with a rapid, easy-to-use authoring and publishing experience desktop users have come to depend on. dominKnow One can be deployed on its own or as part of a larger system. Its open protocol, standards-based approach means easy integration with LMS or LRS solutions, and ensures future-proof capabilities.
Bringing a Wave of Change
According to dominKnow, there’s a rush for authoring tool vendors to get on the responsive content bandwagon, which is great for those wanting to develop material that can be accessed on multiple devices and used in multiple ways. However, not all responsive tools are created equal. Most authoring tool vendors try to impose a dumbed-down and limited approach to learning content development. Templated, fill-in-theblank, or block-based tools help get stuff out of the door and meet the responsive check-box, but often they don’t satisfy the learning need.
dominKnow’s approach allows all the same powerful, rich content development, the organization is 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 means educators can build rich learning experiences without worrying about specific devices, multiple versions of the same content, or what sized devices the future will bring.
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 learner has — both in and outside the classroom. This learner-centric approach to learning analytics will increasingly be important for forward-thinking instructors and content developers, who continue to deploy varied learning strategies. Thanks to the xAPI integration, instructors, content developers, learners, and managers will now be able to access metrics related to content access and interaction that will allow them to measure and assess its effectiveness. In addition to these, dominKnow One fully supports the xAPI standard, providing a wealth of tracking capabilities out-of-the-box with no extra effort or programing required by the content author.
Tackling Rough Days
The status quo is dominKnow’s biggest competitor, and its biggest challenge. Change is hard; with limited resources and time people tend to keep doing things as they always have done, even when there’s recognition of issues or problems.
According to the organization, there are a number of good content authoring tools available, but only few of them cover the same ground as dominKnow. The organizations’ dogged focus on the collaborative development of multiuse, truly responsive content makes it unique. To date, the company has won several industry awards related to content management, content authoring, mobile authoring, and mobile access, which speaks strongly to how well that focus is paying off.
The Future Ahead
With the recent launch of dominKnow One, which is the latest version of the organizations’ content authoring solution, comes major advances in single-source, multi-use content authoring, true-responsive content output, software simulation, and the most complete support of xAPI in the industry — all in a single platform. Even with the focus on these enhancements, dominKnow didn’t lose sight of the importance of a powerful but simplified authoring experience. To that point, dominKnow One continues to flesh out the organizations’ robust offering of rich templates, stock images & characters, responsive premade components, buttons and gauges, built-in actions, and a large integrated asset library that educators can easily add to and share as they develop their own learning experiences.
Source :- The 10 Most Innovative EdTech Solution Providers 2018