Smart Author™

Smart Author provides publishers and educators an easy way to create effective, adaptive courseware. Develop and deliver rich, interactive courses grounded in learning science. Quickly author abundant formative activities, rich content, and multi-form assessments for a "learn by doing" approach to instruction.

Based on principles of learning science

Using best practices from CMU’s Open Learning Initiative, leaders in learning science research, Acrobatiq Smart Author includes step-by-step guidance to creating exemplary online learning experiences that help students learn more efficiently and effectively.

Designed for collaboration

Includes enterprise-grade workflow tools to support the rapid development of online learning courses and programs. Smart Author includes multiple role types and levels of permissions for complete control over the development process, from initial concept to course release and continuous updates.

Supports multiple content types

Quickly develop lessons with interactive content, activities, and assessments so students learn by doing. Smart Author tools make it easy to include hundreds of discrete opportunities for students to practice skills and learn new concepts.

Includes a variety of assessment types

Easily create goal-directed practice and targeted feedback, critical to learning. Smart Author includes over 25 different activity types to create formative practice embedded with instructional scaffolding such as multiple levels of hints and targeted, timely feedback.

Simplifies course customization

Smart Author gives authoring teams complete control over course content and assessments to organize content in the order you want students to learn. In just a few clicks you can add, remove or reorder learning modules. Create and experiment with alternate versions of the same course “blueprint” for different types of learners.

Personalizes the learning experience

Courses developed in Smart Author dynamically personalize learning for each student, based on his or her own learning needs. With Smart Author, you can easily create adaptive practice sessions that function much like a human tutor for students. Frequent hints and error-sensitive feedback help students get “unstuck” and keep students on track to complete courses with a passing grade or better.

Learn more about how active, adaptive learning experiences improve student learning outcomes.

Features of Smart Author™

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Blueprint your course outcomes

Acrobatiq makes it easy to develop a course outline and organize what students should know and be able to do by the end of a course. Outcomes can be expressed as competencies, learning goals, learning objectives or skills and can be problem, project or scenario-based. This provides the basic framework for a well-structured course and the foundation for knowing what gets measured. All expository text, multimedia, assignments and assessments are aligned to specific learning outcomes ensuring a positive learning experience for your students.

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Dynamic content from multiple sources

Purpose-built templates enable you to add your own content or use content from other sources such as Acrobatiq’s library of exemplar courseware, OER or 3rd party content from publishers. Instructional design prompts guide courseware development using best practices and design principles from CMU’s acclaimed Open Learning Initiative.

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Collaborate using workflow management tools

Enterprise-grade tools for teams of educators and instructional designers to actively collaborate on the development of beautiful, adaptive online courseware. With support for multiple role types, projects and permissions, you control the courseware development process from initial concept to courseware release and continuous updates.

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Organize, track and manage your assets

Managing a large number of media assets used on online courseware is easy with Smart Author. Course designers can upload and tag media and track rights management all without leaving the the Smart Author course development interface.

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Formative and summative assessments

Smart Author includes templates for multiple question types, each with hints and targeted feedback. Using a simple form-like interface, courseware authors can develop practice and assessments by choosing from more than 22 template question types including multiple choice, true/false, drag and drop, fill-in-the-blank and many others. Smart Author supports math questions with a configurable equation. Toggle the sensitivity in recognizing answers to get a flexible range of options for math-related instruction.

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Learning analytic dashboards

The Learning Dashboard™ collects, stores, and analyzes learning data generated when a student undertakes learning activities created in Smart Author. Activities and learning content are tied to specific learning objectives Smart Author. This enables Acrobatiq to utilize a learning model developed at Carnegie Mellon University to analyze the data and provide highly visual, actionable insights.

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Personalized, adaptive learning

Research has clearly shown that goal-directed practice, coupled with targeted, timely, and personalized feedback improves students’ ability to learn, often at a faster pace. Acrobatiq Smart Author enables the delivery of personalized practice questions tailored to each students' needs.

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Deliver to your audience

Our cloud-based delivery platform works seamlessly with most leading learning management systems. Courses developed in Smart Author can easily be delivered to students through Blackboard, Canvas, Moodle or dozens of other LMSs. Students can also directly register online for your new course. Let us show you how.

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