Toolkit: Do You Know … dominKnow Claro?

Claro by dominKnow is one of those products that you see inthe exhibit hall at every major eLearning conference and yet, when you asksomeone if they know about Claro, they scratch their head a bit and say, “Well,I’ve heard of it…” Claro is like a well-kept open secret. But no more! It’stime to keep this a secret no longer.

Claro came to my attention recently when dominKnow contactedme with a solution to a challenge I had written for my eLearning toolsnewsletter readers (you can sign up at www.tinyurl.com/elearningjoe). In thechallenge, I showed the running example of a piano keyboard I had created inthree different authoring tools: Adobe Captivate, Articulate Storyline, andAllen Interactions ZebraZapps. They sent me a solution developed in Claro thatwent beyond what I had done. When I asked to see how they had built it and theyagreed, I was impressed with what I saw. In Figure 1, you can see the toolinterface with the piano example loaded.

Figure 1: The interface

So what’s Claro all about?

Claro is an online tool, otherwise known as software-as-a-service(SaaS). More and more, we are seeing software, eLearning and otherwise, beingoffered in this fashion. You install nothing on your computer; instead, you goonline to access the authoring tool. Advantages are many. One potential disadvantage,depending on your situation, is that you need an Internet connection to useClaro—the faster the better.

The menus give a pretty good idea of what you’re able toaccomplish in Claro. The Insert menu, in particular, as seen in Figure 2,illustrates the particular elements that you can place in your lessons.

Figure 2: The Insert menu

This is a true authoring environment, where you constructyour learning by placing images, videos, interactions, and other elements onthe screen where you wish them. That kind of freedom is great, and it forcesyou to put some thought into your design.

Inherent in Claro is a slew of important features. Let meelaborate.

Interactivity and branching

Interactive elements are key to engaging learners. So whatkinds of interactions can you build in Claro? Buttons and hotspots are easy toinclude, and hotspots don’t have to be rectangular. They can be circular orpolygonal, too. Use these to let learners ask questions and/or to navigate toother pages in your lesson. You need not limit learners to boring linearlearning.

Tests, quizzes, assessments

Quizzing in Claro is feature-rich. You have several questiontypes from which to choose, and you can customize the layouts or buildquestions in freeform fashion. You can create question banks through Claro’sunique approach to learning objects and have tests that randomly choose yourquestions from within each objective, thus not skipping key points on your test.

Layers

I like layers. Layers are cool because they let you put alot of power in one screen. You can have as many layers as you wish, and hideand show them as you wish. For example, you can see a very simple example oflayers in Figure 1 in which, when you click a piano key, a blue circle appearson it momentarily to show you which one you clicked. Each circle is in its ownlayer and called up when needed.

Mobile delivery

Yes, you can run your published files on your iPad or othermobile devices, and not only that, you can take advantage of many of thefeatures of such devices, such as multitouch. In the piano example above, thatmeans you can play more than one piano key at a time, just as you would on areal piano. See Figure 3 for an idea of the options you have in Claro.

Figure 3: Setting up a course for smartphones

Actions

There are a number of actions from which you can choose thatare then activated, immediately or with a time delay, when the page loads, amedia file is played, or the learner does something, such as click a button. Figure4 shows you the list of actions possible.

Figure 4: Claro actions

Templates

You can choose from hundreds of categorized and searchable templates.They include layouts and interactive elements, and all of them create Claropages that have no edit or change restrictions.

Resources library

You’ll find that Claro provides you with clip art, symbols,and other shapes by the thousands. In addition, you have access to 31characters, both illustrated and photographic, that you can use to humanizeyour lessons. Each of the 24 photographic characters has over 100 poses andthree different dress styles, resulting in 300 different images for each character.See Figures 5, 6, and 7 to see how you choose your characters.

Figure 5: Choosing a character

Figure 6: Choosing a pose

Figure 7: Using a character in a lesson

Content management

Claro has, in essence, an LCMS under the covers in that it includescontent management features such as a central library to track the usage ofimages, audio, video, widgets, docs, glossary terms, etc., across differentcourses. It allows you to easily reuse and update those files in one step. Atthe macro level, it also provides the ability to share complete topics(learning objects), again allowing these to be not just copied, but reused acrossmultiple courses.

Collaborationfeatures

Since Claro is a web-based tool, it allows authors to workon the same course together, seeing content changes happen in real time. Youcan also assign authors different roles and permissions, depending on whatcontent they should have either edit or working access to. And Claro tracks thework done by different authors as a course is created, which is helpful forproject monitoring.

Reviewers

When you have reviewers assigned to your lessons, they cannot only review your work on the proper devices, such as a smartphone or atablet, they can even enter their comments on those devices and then developerscan address the comments and make changes all from one screen. Nice.

Figure 8 shows the Reviewer Notes section.

Figure 8: The Reviewer Notes

But wait, there’s more

There are a lot of other features in Claro that make it morepowerful. You can synchronize events to audio and video, so that images orother elements appear at the proper time. Page transitions are nice, along witheffects that you can apply to images, such as mirror and shadow. You can useClaro to record your own narration and use the webcam to record video ofyourself, or even make screen recordings or snapshots. There are more featuresthat you may find useful, so don’t think that these are all of them. Check outtheir website for more.

What are Claro’s limitations?

Every tool has its limitations. What are Claro’s?

1. Drag-and-drop interactions are not currentlysupported, but are promised in the next release, due in November.
2. Don’t expect Claro to be able to createautomated software simulations, such as those you can create in AdobeCaptivate, Articulate Storyline, TechSmith Camtasia, etc. You can quicklycapture demonstration versions of software tasks as video and enhance them withon-screen events like additional text or highlighting, but creating a “try it”version has to be done the more traditional way, using images and so on, aslower process. Claro helps by including a built-in capture tool for singlescreens.
3. If you’re into power, you will find thatcurrently Claro has only limited support for variables and other power needs.
4. Don’t expect any game templates or widgets to bebuilt into Claro, though it does support third-party game widgets.
5. There is limited audio and video editing builtinto Claro. I mention this only because we’re seeing more and more media editorsbeing included in authoring tools.

Wrapping up

So is Claro a tool you should consider? It has won theBrandon Hall Gold Award for Best Advance in Content Authoring/Learning ContentManagement two years running, so it’s certainly worth investigating. Itspricing falls in the midrange, ranging from $997 a year for a single author inthe lowest-feature set Claro Lite version to $2,497 per author in the Claro Workgroupedition, which also gives you additional benefits, such as a private cloud,custom-designed templates, a unique domain, and more. And in all versions you canhave as many reviewers as you wish at no additional cost.

Learn more at www.dominknow.com.

Editor’s Note: VisitdominKnow in Booth 302 at The eLearning Guild’s DevLearn Conference & Expo2012 in Las Vegas, October 31 – November1.