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Society of Actuaries Case Study
How the Society of Actuaries Cut Content Review Time and Development with dominKnow | ONE
Challenges
SOA develops and maintains an enormous amount of content across several different subject areas. Creating, reviewing, updating, and approving that content was a cumbersome and tedious process that took an inordinate amount of time.
“Content is our lifeblood,” says Fausher.
“We take great pride in developing first-rate educational material. However, as our content assets grew, it became harder and harder to update and maintain that material — with large amounts of company time and assets diverted to do so.”
Solution
SOA looked at learning technology and content authoring vendors that supported their specific needs. After evaluating several leading technology vendors, SOA selected dominKnow’s authoring and publishing platform, dominKnow | ONE.
Why dominKnow | ONE stood out?
- Responsive content design without limitations.
- Powerful and flexible authoring and customization.
- Single source authoring to create multiple types of content.
- Native MS Office PowerPoint and Word imports and custom XML migrations.
- Easily publish to all eLearning standards, including SCORM and advanced xAPI support.
- An all-in-one integrated cloud-based solution that enables easy sharing and re-use from one central location.
- Versioning and roll back.
- Full text and meta-data search across content to easily locate and reuse elements.
- Complete content management solution with advanced categorization, searching, and content development reporting.
Problems dominKnow | ONE Solved for SOA
- Managing teams and large amounts of content across distributed locations and languages.
- Completing training projects in a timely manner.
- Managing multiple content outputs efficiently and reducing repetition.
- Developing responsive content that isn’t restricted to a basic templated design.
- Creating more valuable content by understanding learner engagement and creating content for different points of need.
- Creating accessible content that meets all learners’ needs.
- Having to understand and use multiple platforms for different content types.
- Authoring and distributing content efficiently.
- Manage learning at scale.
dominKnow | ONE was built to comply with industry standards, protecting learning investments now and in the future.
dominKnow | ONE is unique because it is an authoring software tool and a cloud-based content management system that allows organizations to facilitate content reuse and team collaboration.
Results
Today Fausher and her group manage over 400 pre-qualification courses, continuing education courses, and SOA meeting/session recordings in dominKnow | ONE – that’s over 10,000 pages of content.
“We have courses and modules that are taken for pre-qualification credit and professional development purposes,” says Fausher. “Using dominKnow | ONE, we easily repurposed the content of our pre-qualification courses to create most of our professional development material — saving 25% of our development time.”
dominKnow’s cloud-based platform makes it possible for SOA to fully leverage their valuable intellectual property by making it easy to centrally manage, re-use, and repurpose content. Content management features ease the burden of developing and maintaining an extensive library.
“Another feature that has saved us valuable time and money is being able to find and replace assets within our courses. With the vast amount of content we have, it would be very time-consuming to manually replace images and documents as they change regularly. With dominKnow, it’s very simple, effortless, and straightforward, with versions and history all tracked for us.”
Review cycles were also time-consuming before SOA signed on with dominKnow. That’s because SOA’s development process involves Society members, volunteers, internal staff, and, more recently, external developers from multiple vendors on some projects.
“dominKnow has streamlined our review and feedback process immensely,” says Fausher. “We save more than 50% of the time we used to spend in the review process.” According to Michael Wolfe, the SOA’s Director of eLearning, “dominKnow has really robust functionality for a distributed multi-reviewer environment.” They benefit from the ability of reviewers to “interactively comment” with one another and have all remarks in one place. “It’s especially helpful when there are multiple review cycles.”
They also love the native resolution and tracking features, given the geographic spread of contributors. Fausher explains, “Everything is easily tracked and updated across time zones and countries.”
Creating, updating, and managing content is one thing, but it doesn’t amount to much without easy, unhindered access that candidates and members need. dominKnow | ONE outputs HTML5 and publishes to SCORM, AICC, xAPI (TinCan), CMI5, and PENS standards, which means SOA’s content is ready for delivery from virtually any location — the web, the desktop, mobile apps, or in document formats.
“Content from dominKnow | ONE is delivered and supported in multiple formats — which is required by our learners,” says Fausher. “Even print content is supported, which remains important to our members.”
SOA’s members also need their eLearning to come with enhanced search functionality.
Fausher explains, “Because we offer so much content, it’s imperative that our learners can effectively search and locate a specific topic and its supporting material and resources quickly and easily. dominKnow’s content search capability makes it possible.”
Since dominKnow gives its clients an active input role in feature development, SOA was able to enhance existing search functions by suggesting changes they needed, like the inclusion of metadata and filtering by asset type.
The Moonshot
dominKnow’s xAPI capabilities are also crucial for a recent initiative to further enhance high-quality content with new layers of interactivity.
SOA is in the process of building out a companion platform on mobile to complement its eLearning. “Think Instagram, but with actual content,” says Wolfe. “And the behavior is synchronized to what candidates are actually doing in the modules because using xAPI, modules can talk to this external social platform.”
This can augment the learning experience in many ways. For example, a student can be served supplemental content within the companion platform after they finish a particular section. They might also get a just-in-time review of previous material that will be important to an upcoming lesson.
This platform also opens the possibility of “social and collaborative” interactivity. For example, candidates taking a pre-qualification module can theoretically “be dropped into a cohort together, based on when they started,” using text chat to discuss thought questions or offer peer assistance.
“All of that is xAPI enabled,” Wolfe explains. It relies on eLearning content that generates xAPI statements describing granular information about behavior within the courseware.
Where does dominKnow | ONE come into play? It makes the jump into an xAPI ecosystem much less labor-intensive. dominKnow | ONE automatically generates xAPI statements for nearly every action your learner takes – you just need to decide what to track and analyze. If a statement isn’t already there, you can create your own without a single line of code.
As a result, few changes are needed within existing course modules to support a next-level experience like the one SOA is building. With xAPI support, SOA was able to further raise the bar on its already first-rate eLearning content.
