Cerego Create and Learn — Content Authoring Guide

Introduction

1. Cerego Overview

2. Basic Parts of Cerego

3. Authoring Features of Cerego

4. Navigation

Getting Started with Cerego

1. Create a Set

2. Customizing Set Information

3. Create Items

4. Teach and Instruct Items

5. Quiz Items

6. Arrange Items into a Learning Path

7. Determining Your Learning Path and Item Templates

Introduction

Cerego’s content authoring tool helps you turn facts, vocabulary, concepts, and images into engaging pieces of instruction. This guide walks you through the ins and outs of using the features of this tool, and demonstrates how to build compelling, engaging content for your learners.

Cerego Overview

Cerego is a rapid authoring tool designed to help learners master concepts through a personalized practice schedule. Our goal is to help students distribute their practice over time, which is the most effective way to build knowledge that lasts!

Basic Parts of Cerego Content

In the most basic sense, we tend to refer to parts of Cerego content in the following ways:

• Items: These are the individual units of instruction or assessment. Items contain concepts, which are the important pieces of information that you want learners to know. In Cerego Create and Cerego Learn, you currently have the option of creating two different types of items:

• Teach and Instruct: These items provide context to learners and allow you to explain concepts using uploaded images, sound, or narrative text. You also have the option of embedding videos, presentations, or documents in these items.

• Quiz Items: These items consist of question types that give learners opportunities to test and practice their knowledge of concepts.

• Sets: A set is a collection of items. You can think of it as something similar to a chapter in a book, or a section of a manual.

• Learning path: This is how you order items within a set. This will determine when and how the concepts are presented to learners.

User Tip

We recommend keeping the number of items to 10–25 per set. If there are too many items in a set, learners may become overwhelmed by information. If there are too few items in a set, learners’ practice of concepts will not be optimized. Ten to twenty-five items per set allows learners adequate times to learn and practice important concepts.

Authoring Features of Cerego

Cerego has many specialized features to help you create content quickly and efficiently:

• Automatic saving: Cerego saves your work automatically as you work on your content!The auto saving status will update to let you know when each edit is saved.
• Previewing content:You can easily preview any content, even while working on an item or set, to see what learners will see when working through the course.

• Quick Quality Assurance (QA):QA your content as you make it by scrolling through the side nav. You can expand each item card with a single click.The expanded states hows an overview of your item and its quizzes, which contains information like the number of quizzes in the set, the number of concepts learners will see, and which items have images and sound.

• Realtime updates: You can see your changes update and save in real time as you create new content. This gives you an up-to-date view of your learning path-and of what your learners will see.

• Automatic content suggestions: Cerego uses natural language processing when you create and enter content into Cerego. This means that as you work, the platform will offer suggestions for items and question distractors and also populate these items for you.

Navigation

In order to create content efficiently in Cerego, it can be helpful to get to know Cerego’s navigation components and view settings.

• Palette: This is the screen that shows all the item templates available. It is the first thing you’ll see after you create a new set.

• Sidenav: This refers to the bar down the left-hand side of your screen. You can use the side nav to click and drag items to different spots in order to change your learning path.

• You can also preview all your items here in two different states:

• Default state: This allows you to look at all the items in the column from top to bottom.

• Grid state: Grid state takes over the entire screen, allowing you to see and arrange all of your content at once.

• Top bar navigation: The top bar navigation allows you to select options to:

• preview the item you are authoring or preview the entire set

• view the autosaving status of your item and set

• update the set name and image

Create a Set

There are two ways to create a set:

1. Upload SCORM: After clicking the “Create Set” button, you should select the Upload SCORM button.

2. Use the item editor.

Customizing Set Information

After creating your set, you can customize it in two locations:

• Authoring page menu: This is located in the top left-hand corner of your screen. Clicking on the pencil tool will allow you to edit your set’s name. Clicking on the grey circle will allow you to upload or change the main photo associated with your set.

Create Items

As mentioned in the Create a Set section, you will have the option to either upload SCORM for your items, or create items manually using our provided item templates. There are two basic categories of items you can create:

1. Items that teach and instruct learners on key concepts.

2. Items that test or quiz learners about (recently) introduced key concepts.

Each item type has different functionality; however, some items share the same basic parts. We refer to the parts of Cerego items in the following ways:

• Stem: This refers to the main question you are asking in an item.

• Answer: This is the correct answer to your stem.

• Distractors: These are other answer options that are incorrect.

• Explanations: Sometimes called feedback or rationales in other test banks. They explain why an answer is correct or why distractors are plausible, but ultimately incorrect.

All Cerego item templates are optimized for mobile use, making any spot an ideal location for your learners to develop mastery of a course’s core concepts. The most effective learning paths in Cerego use both categories of items to appropriately introduce learners to material and test their understanding. For more tips on how to decide what items to use and how to arrange items on a learning path, see Determining Your Learning Path and Item Templates.