A new feature that saw the light of the day in these days is 'invite students'.
Suppose you've created a free course and you want to provide links to your friends, relatives or colleagues, so they can check it out.
Or suppose you want to invite people for free to your premium course, maybe because they've already paid their course quote, or they are friends or great influencers.
From your course students' perspective, you can now invite a person. Just click the "Invite a new student.." button.
Clicking it will show you a page where you can enter an e-mail address and invite that person. (S)he will receive an e-mail explaining that you have invited them to join your e-learning course.
The invite is for one person and can be used only one time, then it expires, so if you want to invite 4 people, you will have to send 4 e-mails.
Each course you create on LearnerHQ can have a different payment strategy.
Basically, a course can be free or premium, and this is set from each course Payment Settings.
As you can see you can switch from a free course to a premium one. Offering a free course is great, and it means that any LearnerHQ user can choose to follow the course for free. On the other hand, a Premium course will let you charge people to follow your course.
If you click on the radio button next to "Premium course", there'll be displayed two more options, to let you choose if your course will have a one-time or recurring subscription.
What does this mean? If you choose a one-time subscription, your students will pay a fee when they will sign up. The subscription will last for the amount of days you specify in the "Subscription duration" box.
If you choose a recurring subscription instead, your students will pay a fee each 30 days of subscription. This can be useful if you do not set a specific amount of time your students will be subscribed too, or if you plan to grow your course over time and people could be interested in following you for an indefinite period.
The course content editing has been refactored today.
Now you can easily organize your lessons in units and set the publishing options in a snap.
Here's a preview:
If you create a course using the LearnerHQ e-Learning Platform you'll have a great tool you can use to leverage payments and avoid losing time to check subscriptions, create and delete user accounts.
All you have to do is instruct PayPal to let LearnerHQ access your PayPal API, put your PayPal e-mail address in your profile and our framework will do everything for you!
Then just set the course price & currency in the course settings:
This is a killer feature we've recently introduced to help you create and manage an online e-learning course, because we know how hard it is.
The 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps from Carsonified on Vimeo.
Over the last week we've worked on a number of features, highlighted in the previous post.
Starting today, you can
Here's a screenshot of the Publishing Settings page:
Other options we've introduced are:
Here's a screenshot of the Subscription Options:
During the last brainstorming sessions we tried to draw a few e-learning scenarios: there are many different types of courses, and everyone has different needs.
For example, we can have a course that spans on 4 weeks and the teacher wants the students to access only the lessons of that particular week, not the future ones.
After the course is over the owner may want to let the students access the course lessons & assets for a month, a year or forever.. or he/she may want to deny it. The owner may also want the students to come back and discuss any future issue on the course forum, or not.
So there are quite a few parameters, we already outlined the following ones:
There are a lot of things we want to take care of, so you don't have to, and this is just a list of a few things we're working on.
I've added a nice pagination feature, so you can browse through all the blog old posts, and when the forums will be populated with new content, you'll be able to browse it.
What's next in the development checklist? I'm going to expand a little the introductory course, "How to Create a great e-Learning Course using LearnerHQ" so you can learn a lot about the LearnerHQ e-learning Platform.
There's an interesting analysis of a Twitter vs Google Buzz on the 37signals blog.
The NY Times has published a review of both services, comparing their features and building a checklist.
It's obvious that Google Buzz has more features than Twitter, it's more powerful, but.. given that, I've tried it and will never use it again. Like I'll never use Google Wave, they're simply too complicated, too overwhelmed to be used.
This sentence captures it:
Sometimes all that stuff your product does NOT do is exactly why people want it.
We're building the entire LearnerHQ plaform from scratch, so many features are not yet implemented.
One of the most obvious feature on a blog is the RSS feed, so you can subscribe and get notified by your favourite RSS Reader (e.g. Google Reader) when there's news on LearnerHQ.
So here it is, you can click the RSS button on your browser, or copy/paste this URL in your RSS reader.
This blog post announces the launch of the private beta of LearnerHQ, a great simple-to-use e-Learning Platform.
What means private beta? It means that we open the website to some selected users, so we can work and improve the existing features with a small user base.
If you want to join our private beta program, register and drop us an e-mail stating why you want to join us, and what we could do for you.
The current roadmap (subject to changes) is:
The product simply works and we'll outline the main features in the next blog posts.
Our focus in this first phase is making LearnerHQ even more simple to use, yet more powerful for teachers and students.
Everything will follow our key values, that include:
"Who will save book publishing?
What will save the newspapers?
What means 'save'?
If by save you mean, “what will keep things just as they are?” then the answer is nothing will. It’s over."
Seth Godin, Who will save us?
There’s more to building a great product than just studying the market or the technology or competitors. You need to have taste too. You need to understand what “great” means in a big picture sense, not just in your chosen field.
Seek out apostles, not partners. People who benefit from spreading your idea, not people who need to own it.
Think big. Bigger than that.
Waiting for inspiration is another way of saying that you're stalling. You don't wait for inspiration, you command it to appear.
Are you a serial idea-starting person? If so, what can you change to end that cycle? The goal is to be an idea-shipping person.
Rise up to the opportunity, and do the idea justice.
Seth Godin, Random rules for ideas worth spreading
“When I was at MOMA last week, I saw a list of director and artist Tim Burton’s projects. Here’s the guy who’s responsible for some of the most breathtaking movies of his generation, and the real surprise is this: almost every year over the last thirty, he worked on one or more exciting projects that were never green lighted and produced. Every year, he spent an enormous amount of time on failed projects.”
“US schools are often bad. A lot of parents realize it, and would be interested in ways for their kids to learn more. Till recently, schools, like newspapers, had geographical monopolies. But the web changes that. How can you teach kids now that you can reach them through the web? The possible answers are a lot more interesting than just putting books online.” Paul Graham, Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund
Everyone has something to learn. Maybe I can teach you something about how a Web Application can be planned and built, but I’ve to learn everything else (or, nearly). So.. everyone can teach the others something they’re great at. And if they’re not great at anything, they can teach what they’re good at. The matter is not how much you know, but what do you know more than me. “The information is free now. No need to pool tax money to buy reference books. What we need to spend the money on are leaders, sherpas and teachers who will push everyone from kids to seniors to get very aggressive in finding and using information and in connecting with and leading others.” Seth Godin, The future of the library
“3 Questions That Encourage Simplicity: 1) How many people are asking for it? 2) Who is asking for it? 3) How will it affect others? 3 Steps To Achieving Simplicity: 1) Remove 2) Hide 3) Shrink”
“Avoid tempting distractions Support customers maniacally Write a blog Guard your time Get enough sleep Improve product daily Start charging early Sell something today Say “NO” often Believe in yourself Try something new Build a brand Focus, focus, focus Live your vision Celebrate your successes Cancel unnecessary meetings Keep it fun Ship then test Do not partner” OnStartups, Startup Advice In Exactly Three Words “Aren’t you oversimplifying this? Yes. That’s the whole point.” Steve Krug’s new book, Rocket Surgery Made Easy I strongly believe that we must simplify things. Abstract, if you like, not deal with the complex. http://www.owlsparks.com/decisions/the-end-of-education/ Great points. "True education does not need to be imposed, does not expire and it certainly does not have any finish lines. True education is a component of our everyday activity."
The future of the library
Three Secrets To Simplicity
Startup Advice, great tips for anything
Oversimplifying
Simplify!
The End Of Education
Display# Page 1 of 1
