ClicFlic offers assessment innovation

A while back I posted about a creative use of technology that Vestas was using for onboarding. At the time I wrote about the potential I saw for the use of such technology for assessment, but actually creating these videos was a bit of a mystery from the customer side. Now I've come across a vendor that allows us to create these tools.

I don't post about specific products very often--usually I focus on research and best practices--but I have made occasional exceptions. When I see a product that I think has the potential to be innovative, highly effective, and highly valid, I want to share the wealth.

Such is the case with ClicFlic. In a nutshell, ClicFlic allows customers to create customized interactive web-based videos that can be used for things like situational judgment tests (SJTs). But we've seen that before, right? What I hadn't seen was the branching ability of ClicFlic.

Historically, video-based testing, whether Internet-enabled or not, presents all candidates with the same content. A situation is presented, and the candidate is provided with either several pre-determined responses or an open-ended response area. But much like traditional computerized adaptive testing (CAT), ClicFlic allows for the creation of branching videos. In other words, what the user sees in the next segment will vary depending on how they respond on the current one.

Although most of the examples you'll see on their website involve customer service or training applications, the technology is easily adaptable to assessment situations, as you can see from this example.

I had an opportunity to speak with Mike Russiello, President and CEO of ClicFlic (and co-founder of Brainbench) and he allowed me to peek "under the hood"--what I saw looked plug-and-play easy. The scripting branches are easy to generate, videos simple to upload, and you can quickly assign points to different responses. The videos are flash-based and you can easily generate the HTML to place it on a webpage.

Want to learn more? Check out the examples on their website--the demo on the front page will give you a good feel for the technology. Here are some others that will give you an idea of the possibilities. For assessment-specific usages, here you can select several different types of items with some characters you may recognize.

Questions? You can learn more about how the tools are built here. You may also run into Mike at SIOP if you have questions. Finally, they're also planning on an upcoming webcast through tmgov.org.

I hope this sparks some interest for you and maybe even some ideas about where this technology could be taken even further (RJPs anyone?).