Streamlining eLearning Development: dominKnow | ONE 7.4.5 Release Brings Powerful New Features

For instructional designers and eLearning developers, creating engaging, interactive content while maintaining efficiency is a constant balancing act. The 7.4.5 release of dominKnow | ONE introduces several game-changing features that not only enhance the learner experience but also streamline the content development process.

Enhanced Content Management with the New Recycle Bin

One of the most significant additions is the new Recycle Bin feature for deleted page elements. Every instructional designer has experienced that moment of panic after accidentally deleting an important piece of content. Maybe your current tool even lets you undelete an element, that is if you do so in less than 30 seconds. As if content developers need any more pressure!

Now, deleted content is automatically stored in a page specific Recycle Bin until you or an approved team member choose to remove it permanently.

This feature is particularly valuable when:

• Experimenting with different layout options without fear of losing work
• Recovering complex elements like tabsets, enabling full recovery of the tabset fully intact or even selecting to recover individual elements within the tabset
• Managing multiple iterations of content during the review process
• Collaborating with colleagues who prune things a little too quickly!

The Recycle Bin doesn't impact published packages, ensuring efficient file management while providing peace of mind. This, combined with the already existing Deleted Pages Recycle Bin, Page versioning, and the ability to undo a variety of common actions helps developers to experiment and collaborate without worry.

Page Dividers: Enhanced Visual Design and Learner Progress Control

dominKnow | ONE uniquely enables, from one interface, the design of content in both standard fixed layout (Claro) and fully responsive (Flow) designs. With longer responsive pages, dominKnow | ONE provides several options to enable creative designs between page sections. With the new Divider elements for Flow authors can take another leap forward in both visual design and learner experience control. These tools enhance dominKnow | ONE content creators’ ability to address two critical challenges in eLearning development: creating visually organized content and managing learner progression.

Visual Organization Made Simple

The new Line and Numbered Dividers allow instructional designers to:

• Create clear visual separation between content topics
• Establish a logical flow in longer scrolling pages
• Maintain consistent visual hierarchy throughout courses
• Add professional polish without requiring advanced design skills
• Provide design flexibility with multiple out of the box and custom options

Improved Learner Progress Management

The new Completion Dividers are particularly powerful for creating structured learning experiences. They enable you to:

• Gate content access based on completion requirements
• Provide visual progress indicators to learners
• Customize completion messages and instructions
• Control content reveal behaviors after completion

Combined with dominKnow | ONE’s unique “page complete” trigger, this feature is invaluable for efficiently ensuring learners fully engage with critical content before moving forward, while maintaining a clean, professional design.

Automated Design Enhancements

The release includes several features that save significant development time while improving course aesthetics:

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‍Enhanced Background Image Control

Adding background images to course content is a powerful way to enhance visual interest and reinforce learning objectives. However, maintaining text readability over these images has traditionally required additional design steps or external image editing. The new Darken setting for Section backgrounds solves a common design challenge by:

• Improving text readability over background images
• Eliminating the need for image editing in external tools
• Providing quick adjustments for optimal contrast
• Maintaining visual interest while ensuring content clarity

Scroll and Fade Animation Defaults

At the heart of dominKnow | ONE's efficiency is its powerful theme system. Themes are reusable course level designs that control the overall look, feel, and navigation of your content. When you update a theme, those changes automatically cascade to every project using that theme – dramatically reducing maintenance time and ensuring consistency across your learning content.

This release enhances the theme system with new scroll and fade animation settings at the theme level. Instead of manually configuring entrance effects for individual elements across multiple projects, instructional designers can now set these animations once in the theme. These animations are automatically applied to all content using that theme, while still preserving the flexibility to create custom effects where needed. This feature:

• Automatically adds professional polish to scrolling pages
• Maintains consistency across course materials
• Reduces development time significantly
• Enables authors to select custom animations where desired

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‍Improved List Elements

Lists are fundamental building blocks in eLearning content, serving as powerful tools for organizing information and guiding learners through complex topics. The enhanced List elements in this release transform the way instructional designers can work with these crucial components. Through a streamlined wizard-based interface and expanded design options, the improved List element now offers:

• More default styles for quick implementation
• Simplified editing interface
• Sequential animation options through triggers and actions
• Greater visual design flexibility compared to standard text bullets

‍Enhanced Accordion Menu Flexibility

Accordion menus are essential tools for organizing complex information in eLearning content, allowing learners to navigate through material at their own pace while maintaining a clean, uncluttered interface. The 7.4.5 release expands design possibilities with a new accordion style option, giving instructional designers more flexibility in how they present information.

This additional styling option expands the existing accordion capabilities enabling content creators to:

• Vary the visual presentation of content sections
• Create distinct visual hierarchies for different types of information
• Maintain learner engagement through varied design elements
• Achieve different aesthetic goals without sacrificing functionality

By offering multiple accordion styles within the Options Tab, designers can quickly switch between different visual presentations while maintaining the accordion's intuitive interaction model and even have it, if desired, auto switch to a tabs view on larger screens. This enhancement provides greater creative freedom while preserving the streamlined development workflow for which dominKnow | ONE is known.

‍Streamlined Technical Implementation

Many instructional designers and organizations find themselves stuck with their current authoring tools, even when these tools no longer meet their evolving needs. The prospect of managing content across multiple platforms or undertaking a complete content migration can seem overwhelming, often becoming a significant barrier to adopting better solutions.

dominKnow addresses this challenge head-on by offering comprehensive conversion services, including automated conversion from platforms like Articulate Rise. Understanding that many teams use Storyline blocks to overcome limitations inherent within Articulate Rise, dominKnow has introduced a new Storyline Profile for HTML Widgets that automatically detects and configures appropriate settings for Articulate Storyline content. This automation:

• Reduces technical configuration time
• Minimizes potential setup errors
• Streamlines the content integration process
• Improves workflow efficiency

Need to migrate your Articulate content? Learn how dominKnow can make this process easy and painless.

 Impact on eLearning Development

These updates collectively address several key challenges in eLearning development:

1. Time Efficiency: Automated features like Theme-level animations and Storyline content detection reduce repetitive tasks and technical setup time.
2. Design Quality: New visual tools like Dividers and enhanced background controls help create professional-looking content without requiring advanced design skills.
3. Learner Engagement: Completion Dividers and improved content organization tools enable better structured, more engaging learning experiences.
4. Content Management: The Recycle Bin feature provides a collaborative ongoing safety net for content development and iteration.

Conclusion

The 7.4.5 release of dominKnow | ONE demonstrates a deep understanding of instructional designers' needs. By introducing features that simultaneously improve the learner experience and streamline the development process, this update helps eLearning creators focus more on crafting effective learning experiences and less on technical implementation.

Whether you're creating new courses or updating existing content, these new features provide the tools needed to develop more engaging, professional, and effective eLearning content in less time.

Read more about these features in the dominKnow community.

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