February...

I'm back in Australia now, after having transited the Panama canal with Maverick Dream. Meanwhile, tutorom has some new lesson types and we are about to install a couple of new servers for on2 video/flash conversion and for powerpoint/flash conversion. We've also developed live audio recording and capture and this will go public shortly. I wasn't happy with the user interface for the media browser so a few changes coming for that, as well as a lessons page area similar to the files area.

We've designed tutorom as an online lcms, with a standalone application coming later this year, but we are also working on a new site called eduslide.com, which will be a personal learning environment. Using similar tools as tutorom to create and aggregate content, it won't have a course structure as such. It will be a loose collection of your own learning content, which you can share with others if you want. This should not take too long to create since most of the work has already been done via tutorom. I'm looking forward to sharing the ideas with you as we build it.

For vtc, we've just developed some cool flash widgets to play free movies and see what's on offer. These also work with the affiliate system, so if you have registered as an affiliate and then add your affiliate code to the widget, you'll get 20% of resulting signups when anyone clicks on Learn More or any of the buttons coming to the vtc site. Check these out:

http://66.160.128.94/test/index.html
http://66.160.128.94/test/index2.html
http://66.160.128.94/test/index3.html
http://66.160.128.94/test/index4.html

Happy New Year

Happy new year to everyone from Cannes, France. Just stopped by to visit friends and colleagues here, en route to London next week to exhibit at the Bett 2008 technology education show. We have a small stand (SW140), where I'll be looking for feedback on tutorom and vtc.com. Feel free to drop by and chat. Then onwards at the end of the week for Macworld in San Francisco where we will be demoing tutorom and vtc products. Mohan, Mathew and Dhanesh (developers on tutorom.com) will be with us from VTC India,as well as staff from VTC USA.

Having a break is always good for new ideas to come up, so here are a few that we shall probably implement...

* lesson browsing and addition from tutorom - we will then add content from around the web for you to assemble into courses or just to browse and learn.
* project manager added to admin menu on tutorom to help you build and collaborate.
* standalone version of tutorom (with all vtc educational content included) for download
* on vtc.com, addition of menu for community features - forum, chat and "ask your question", to be answered in text or video format if warranted.
* facebook application for vtc, so you can login and play content directly.

We have another 7 lesson types about to be added, including question and answer, a picture/audio slidemaker, ppt to swf converter, blog/journal, a simulation type, a poll/survey and a language lesson type. Using that last lesson type, we will also be creating English learning courses.

So, lots on the go...see you at either Bett or Macworld. After that flurry of shows, I am headed back to Maverick Dream in Aruba, preparing to cross the Panama Canal and prepare the boat for crossing the Pacific.

at berlin webexpo2

Currently in Berlin, ready to get some feedback from the longtail pavilion at the web2 expo (http://berlin.web2expo.com/). Should be interesting. At least we have part of the system in German.

Have initiated a few changes to the menu navigation system, which will result in a simpler system. Before login, there will be just Home and Learn menus, with Learn featuring communities, courses, lessons and objects. These areas are where public items can be browsed with a quick link to upload or create directly from each section.

We are almost finished with the website creation system, so it will be easy to create your own community to display your courses and lessons. Also, almost done with the wiki lesson type, and currently working on the forum and language learning lesson types.

We've been discussing backups of lessons and data created on the system - not possible yet, but the long term aim will be to convert some of the lesson types to flash and xml, then it should prove easier to do this. The language learning lesson is the first we are doing so we shall see how it progresses.

To anyone in Berlin who is visiting, feel free to drop by the long tail pavilion and say hi.

choices...

I've been looking around on the web, as one does, looking for other elearning companies doing something similar, and aside from tteach, which has yet to launch, can't really find anything - let me know if anyone finds anything out there similar.

By the end of the year, we'll have finished most of the basic structure of tutorom.com, although I have a dozen ideas for lesson types. I don't intend to compete with the likes of Articulate's products, but I'm sure there are plenty of simple lesson types that teachers and instructors can use, and that's where we will spend some time playing.

We are converting the swf modules for education into tutorom type slides, which means teachers can login, clone the lessons and change them as they see fit. They can also use the library of swf animations, graphics etc in their own lessons as well. All completely free.

Which reminds me. People keep asking me how I intend to make money from all this. Well...if the odd visitor signs up for a subscription to the excellent VTC software learning library, we can keep it free for the future. We'll see how it goes.

For anyone who wants to say hello, I shall be at Bett (9-12 Jan) in UK at Olympia (on a tiny stand with a big plasma, probably around the software section), and on a slightly bigger stand at Macworld San Francisco (15-18 Jan). I'll be a bit jetlagged but hey..that's normal. My lead developers Sajith and Mathew from our offices in Kochi will be there as well.

still hard at work on new features

We decided to go back to certain parts of tutorom and change a few things. The main feature we are working on and should be finished this week, is the media browser. Different things can be loaded in and applied to lesson types as we create them - video and audio recorded, embeds created as assets to be reused, uploads of video converted to flv and in future, integration of assets from other sites such as slideshare.

A couple of weeks ago, we imported a lot of Expert Village content as embeds..but they asked us to change the way it is displayed, so we are designing a new lesson type to make it simple to add embeds, video and text. That will also allow us to create some of our own content much faster as well as display embedded content from other sites better than before.

We've also been working on a lesson type for language learning, created in flash and that should be available shortly as well. I can't wait for that to be online as I love learning new languages, and this is the way I want to both teach and learn.

For those that want to use it, we are creating an assignments lesson type, linked to online gradebook and reporting module. This should prove useful for teachers.

You'll notice a few other features here and there - little improvements that make life easier for authors and students.

I've been in Australia now for a couple of months, but this week I am headed off to Japan for a few days and then onto UK for a few weeks. As always, online wherever I lay my hat...:)

more updates, forum to come...

We've made quite a few small changes on the site to make the user experience better, and we have the translation module finished. Anyone who wants to translate the site via an easy web interface gets a link at the bottom of the site in that language pointing to a special page where you can advertise your services etc.

This week we should be installing a public forum where I will be listing the features we have planned, so anyone can comment on them. Next week, we plan on installing the on2.com flix engine for converting uploaded video to flash as well as another module to convert uploaded powerpoints to flash. And if we have time, installation of flash media server so we can offer real time recording of audio and video.

So..plenty of things happening - hope to get some feedback via the new forum.

plans to improve search this week

Thanks for the feedback so far for tutorom - we've fixed a couple of small bugs, and will be fixing a couple more on Monday.

One of the main things we shall be doing this week is to filter the search results after clicking on channels - they will all have featured, popular and recently added headers for the display. Also, when you search via the search box, it will only find within the channel previously selected (if any). We'll be adding a country/language code for each course linked to the user language preferences so you'll only see your courses in your language.

At some point in the near future we shall be adding the ability to display only the channels you are interested in (as well as adding more channels as demand grows).

I'm sifting through blog postings about the site, and I'll comment later on some of things said - some good ideas coming in that we can think about and perhaps implement.