Frequently Asked Questions

Doctum is a system for Trainers, Human Resource Professionals, Subject Matter Experts and Translators who design, develop, publish and share eLearning content. Doctum's easy editing tools and great collaboration features allow you to easily create and vet eLearning content. Doctum is free to try, sign up today.

Doctum is a website made for eLearning professionals, human resources personnel or anyone at a company responsible for direction and management of a businesses's learning strategy and development. Additionally, Doctum is a great place for Subject Matter Experts, translators and learning interaction developers to network in order to provide their services to eLearning developers.

Doctum has an easy to use interface that allows you to create training content, manage your collaborators, publish your training for your learners, search and browse for great training for your business and connect with experts and other professionals who can help you produce the best training content for your learners.

Doctum has been designed from the ground up to facilitate collaboration. You, as the eLearning developer, can work with editors, content reviewers (SMEs), translators and interaction designers to cooperatively write, storyboard, design and develop content that your learners need.

We have conceived Doctum to be simple. Instead of throwing every option in the book at you, we've included only the bare essentials at any one time. This allows the software to accomplish the goals you lay out in an efficient and straightforward manner.

Social Learning Development™ is the process through which Doctum enables the developer to use the resources they need in order to create the training required by their learners. Simply put, Social Learning Development allows you to build that previously costly safety policy training module by linking that sought after Subject Matter Expert and that Brazilian Portuguese translator you need to complete your goals. (That was a hypothetical situation, it's pretty unlikely that your course requires exactly that).

Doctum is a 100% web based tool that works right in your browser with no additional software required. It uses great interface design and a solid backend to make developing training easy and fast. Simply log in, start at your dashboard and get building. From there you can connect with your users, create new learning content and manage your account.

The learning experience is primarily web based. While you are building your modules, you can always see a live preview of the content you are working on. This preview is a “WYSIWYG” view of what your learners will interact with when they log in after you have published your course. Alternatively, you can deploy your learning as Windows Applications or even Adobe AIR apps for use on the desktop.

Doctum was designed and developed by The Iona Group, Inc. The Iona Group is a creative communications agency that has been building award-winning elearning for over 25 years. The Iona Group has learned what makes great training and what causes frustration in learning developers through its experiences in working with many Fortune 500 enterprises, small and medium sized businesses and educational institutions worldwide.

Doctum was created in order to eliminate some of the bottlenecks encountered time and time again in the creation of eLearning content. Forgoing lengthy design time is made possible by using the high quality layouts and templates available in the system. Content creation is made easier through the rich interface and easy interactivity provided in Doctum’s editor. Collaboration with team members is simplified through a streamlined messaging system and content feedback system in Doctum’s storyboard and collaboration area. Deploying and taking the training is centralized in the Doctum publish area and adding your own learners is a snap. With the low price of Doctum’s plans, the final hurdle of adding eLearning to your company’s human resource portfolio has been eliminated.

Doctum offers a flexible approach to joining and membership. Trial membership in Doctum is free. Depending on how many editors you need to use and how much disk space you require, the pricing varies. You can learn more here.

Doctum is currently used by a number of high profile enterprise customers who value the collaboration and cooperative learning development environment offered by Doctum. Doctum is also used by a number of smaller businesses and institutions that need training content but would otherwise be unable to offer it for their learners due to the typically cost prohibitive pricing of custom elearning.

Doctum content may be branded or customized by theming a template you choose for your project. Your company’s name and logo can be inserted into the screen template to help brand your courses. Additionally, if you have a skilled designer on staff, they can create a template set for you by following our design guidelines here.

Doctum does not offer an LMS for learner management functions like tracking progress or performance metrics at this time. You may add learners to your account to allow them to access the modules you have published online, however. If you want Doctum to offer LMS features, contact us and let us hear you ideas!

We understand you may have an LMS already in place for your learning needs. More details on LMS connectivity are available here. The following LMSes are known to work with Doctum: SAP, Saba, Knowledgeworks, Docent, SimpleLMS and Thinq. If you have a question about custom LMS connectivity needs, you may contact us.

Doctum uses Adobe Flash as its playback engine, so any media type playable by Flash is currently available in Doctum. Images in JPG or PNG format can be used to display graphics and photos. SWF files can be used for animations and interactions. MP3 files can be used for audio media. FLV and H.264 encoded can be played back to cover your video needs.

Doctum has large number of built in content interaction types that can be built directly in the interface with no programming needed. True/False, Multiple Choice, Image Matching and Word/Term Matching are simple to build in the editor and can be previewed as they are built. Image drag and drop operations are easy to build for flash designers, and we provide documentation on how to do that here. We also have provided some sample files for you to use and adapt for your own purposes here. Additionally, deeper interactions like logic trees, scenario based Q&A and other custom interactions can be developed using Flash/Actionscript3 and still report back to Doctum’s LMS using the API we have published here.