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UL EHS Case Study
How dominKnow’s Centralized Platform and Integrated Workflow Tools Maximize Resources, Save Time, and Money for UL EHS Sustainability
Challenges
UL EHS Sustainability had used a FLASH-based solution to develop and manage its eLearning content for many years. However, an ever-increasing demand for learning that is accessible anywhere, many content development bottlenecks that left some resources idle while others were overworked, and the desire to gain control of both the content development process and the resulting learning assets meant that the old way of doing things didn’t measure up anymore.
UL EHS Sustainability needed a content authoring and publishing platform to convert and manage almost 200 FLASH-based courses into fully accessible and reusable learning content.
Solution
UL EHS Sustainability turned to dominKnow because their cloud-based authoring and publishing solution outputs content that is fully HTLM5-compliant and offers complete, centralized control over the development, review, and content management processes.
Content Authoring and Management
dominKnow | ONE provides a highly powerful authoring solution that enables teams to meet a multitude of training needs across the organization. In the development of skills and learner retention, content designers can utilize many different instructional approaches to meet these needs. dominKnow | ONE contributes to these goals by providing teams with the features and tools that enable them to meet their instructional goals.
Some specific items include:
- Single-source design that enables unique elements to meet different audience needs with minimal design effort.
- Built-in widgets providing interactive branching, flip cards, flashcards, memory concentration games, and more to easily build retention exercises.
- Single-source software simulations that generate a show me, try me, guide me, practice me, test me, and job aid activities.
- Adaptive testing and learning options to optimize learner development.
Single-source development provides the promise of developing content once and being able to deploy it in different ways to meet the moments of need for different audiences and purposes. dominKnow enables true single-source design in the modern age by providing authors with the ability to develop modern and highly interactive content that can meet multiple training needs, such as ILT, student guides, eLearning, or a single content piece that adapts to specific audiences.
The result: countless hours saved over the life of the content.
With dominKnow | ONE, organizations can collaboratively gather, create, review, share, reuse, and deliver content that can be used to help learners at multiple times of need — from formal learning through to on-the-job performance support. The platform supports creating and delivering singlesource, multi-purpose content that is easily monitored and measured — so organizations can see who is using what content and the effectiveness of the learning interaction.
dominKnow | ONE combines the best from desktop eLearning solutions with the winning productivity features of cloud-based content management and authoring — providing the most advanced end-to-end solution for authoring, delivering, and measuring learning content.
Dynamic Publishing and Hosting
The Convey dynamic publishing and hosting service enables the Customer to provide this content to its end users in three ways.
- Formal structured self-study learning programs with completion tracking – Instead of publishing SCORM packages and uploading them into the LMS manually, the Customer publishes these courses to the Convey dynamic publishing and hosting service then connects the Convey-hosted content into its LMS for launching and tracking. When changes or edits are required the updated content is republished to Convey and is instantly available for launching from the LMS. The customer does not need to upload new SCORM packages into the LMS for updates.
- Informal access to structured self-study learning programs – The client publishes the exact same courses to Convey as Public Share Links (instead of SCORM) to instantly create website versions. The automatically-generated URL links can then be posted any place they are needed. And content updates are also automatically available as soon as they are ready.
- Just-in-time access to information and answers when end users are working in the software tool, in the flow of their work – The Customer team publishes its Knowledge Base project to Convey as a Public Share Link to create an instant website. The automatically-generated URL can then be posted any place it is needed. Recently the Customer team embedded the Knowledge Base URL right within its software interface under its Help menu item to enable the Knowledge Base to be an inline help and performance support feature within the software itself.
Results
The results were fast, and the impact evident — with 200 courses and all the content available in a fully HTML5-compliant format — accessible anywhere, on any device.
The impact of moving to dominKnow was felt immediately. As part of the solution, the dominKnow development team created an XML export workflow to help convert the existing FLASH-based training material for use in the dominKnow platform. With 70-80% of the material converted and catalogued for re-use automatically, the UL EHS Sustainability development team could edit and tweak content post-conversion. Now the 200 courses and all of their content are available in a fully HTML5-compliant format — accessible anywhere, on any device.
“Moving on from FLASH was a key driver for us, and the relatively simple conversion of existing FLASH-based courses to HTML5 content was critical to the program’s early success,” said Susan Murphy, Director of Professional Learning Services at UL EHS Sustainability.
But success didn’t stop there. UL EHS Sustainability is now in complete control of the content development process. All development team members use the same centralized, secure system to collaboratively create content that is easy to share, reuse and re-purpose. Valuable programming resources, once tied up on simple tasks, can now focus on creating and embedding more engaging and complex user interactions using dominKnow’s content API. At the same time, subject matter experts and other stakeholders can be easily brought into the development and review process.
“We have a dispersed development team, with many stakeholders and subject matter experts located around the globe,” says Murphy. “dominKnow’s centralized platform and workflow tools help us maximize our resources and save time and money. For example, we currently have 800-course translations underway, and we estimate a 50% reduction in translation costs with the dominKnow platform compared to our previous methods and tools.”
