Many institutions are running Learner Management Systems, LMS, to take control of learners, reporting, security and content. Most of these LMS follow a standard called SCORM, meaning that content published independently can be integrated into the LMS.
The huge advantages of this are that all learner information is held in one place, all progress reporting is standardised, yet institutions can use content from many publishers or sources.
Clarity English programs are SCORM 1.2 compliant, so by using your LMS course builder modules you can add a link from your course direct to any particular section of the program.
We updated the way in which the Clarity programs communicate with the LMS in May 2008. Any existing objects will still work, but the new method is more stable. If you have created SCORM content by using Author Plus, please contact us about updating them.
This is easy to do as you can download some sample content (a unit from Reactions!, Business Writing or Road to IELTS) in the form of a SCORM learning object. You can import this into your LMS, and it will connect to the software and content running on our server. Your LMS will pass information to it and it will report back to the LMS.
When you purchase, you have the option to run the Clarity English program on your own server for best performance and control.
We have updated the way in which the Clarity programs communicate with the LMS in March 2010. If your LMS supports objectives, you can now get detailed progress records. You don't need to do anything to get this new functionality if you are running with Clarity hosting. Please contact us to upgrade if you are self-hosting.
You can create your own content in Author Plus and publish for SCORM. Do let us know if you have any trouble doing this.
Yes. You author your content as usual with Author Plus Pro. Then you export it to SCORM. This creates the shared content object, SCO, that you then import into your LMS. Again, the SCO is just a set of pointers to the full program and content - so the LMS will link to your copy of Author Plus when the learner wants to run your content.
Whilst there are no hard rules, it seems to be a good idea to split SCOs into Author Plus units. This lets you group material together, whilst still preserving the goals of reuse and keeping everything manageable. So if you have created a whole course in Author Plus, you might turn it into 5 or 6 SCOs - which you can then import into different sections of your LMS-based course.
Normally you start a Clarity English program by logging in and choosing from a set of menus. However, sometimes a teacher will want learners to work on a particular section - and needs a way to direct the learners to this place. The learners might also have already logged into your system and you want to avoid logging in again. You can do this by passing information to the program when you start it. Click here for more information.
Tense Buster usually come as 5 level compilations that let learners choose which level they want to work on. If you want to direct learners to a particular level, you can split the program into 5. (The rest of this note is quite technical, please contact us for help if you need it.) The following points apply to Reactions and Tense Buster alike.
The Clarity English homepage does two things, it provides a place to log in and it creates links to all the programs that you have subscribed to. Your own pages can do both of these as well, so that the Clarity programs appear to run direct from your web site. The simplest method is to add a link for each program to your web page; you can either pick this up from the html of the Clarity homepage, or just contact us and we will send them to you in an email. When your learners click this link, the program will start running and it will ask them to log in. Example
Whilst Author Plus usually directs everybody to one place to share content, it is possible to use one copy of the program and create accounts that separate each teacher's courses. After you have installed Author Plus, you can create a teacher's account in Results Manager to enable teachers to create private courses and direct their learners to these courses. Full details...
Please note that this is undergoing a complete change at the moment. We will release an update at the end of May 2010 to make this process very much easier.