Another Reason VTC Is Successful

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The following memo was recently sent to VTC.com employees:



Dear Fellow VTC Ninjas,


For the past decade, Mark Vernon and I have been in total agreement that the company should and will provide the highest quality employee health insurance available. Unlike a growing majority of small businesses nationwide, we've managed to continue to pay this benefit, despite soaring costs. From 1999 through 2008, the cost to VTC to pay for your health insurance increased by well over 100%. Every year around February, our insurance broker sends us a letter stating that our premiums will increase on April 1st.

Every year, without fail, our insurance rep comes in for a meeting. We go over the increased costs, and I usually get pretty testy. Sometimes, I'll throw something, but the rep is never impressed because they see this reaction all day long. Then, every year in March, the broker recommends that we consider dropping from Anthem's premium Key Care 10 coverage to Key Care 15, or 20 or something less. This would lower our costs, and place more of the burden on our employees, they explain. In our last such meeting, this was presented as a "good way to get employees to make more cost effective health care decisions". Every year, we consult with our CEO. Every year for the past decade, we have agreed to to keep Anthem Key Care 10 insurance.

Our thinking is not socialist. We do not do this because we are Bed Wetting Liberals, as I've been personally tagged right here in this office. Our rationale is based on cold calculation and hard realities. We reason that we can demand the very best from you on a daily basis, and no matter how much you complain about it, you're not going anywhere. I know that I can call you at any hour and tell you I need your help, and you'll be there - if not out of reciprocal loyalty, then out of a pressing sense that you owe us something. Yes, I know you complain. I know that from time to time you look around for other opportunities. I also know that each time you do, you only realize that you're getting a great deal here. When was the last time somebody quit VTC because there was a better job package waiting for them somewhere else? That is the reason we have continued to pay 100% of our employee's health insurance. We're in this together.

In the near future, we will provide you with a report of your 2008 insurance costs that were paid for by VTC. For now suffice to say that the cost was thousands and thousands of dollars. And thousands. Ask yourself honestly, if this were your company, would you pay those costs? Year after year, would you stare down those increases and still write those checks? If you're like most CEOs, you would not. But I would consider you short-sighted. You would continually lose employees to that better deal. Your recruiting and training costs would shoot up. Your employees would quietly not give a damn about your product or your customers.

It should be said here that we are actively seeking out alternatives to Anthem. We are talking to other brokers and exploring the possibility of joining a consortium of small businesses in order to pool employees and buy coverage at a lower, bulk rate. Make no mistake, the costs are hard and we feel it. I will not promise that we can continue to absorb these costs. My fiduciary responsibilities are not to the employees of VTC, but rather to VTC, Incorporated. If it doesn't benefit the company, we won't do it. Give me a call if you ever need help moving a sofa bed or a ride to the airport, but in matters of corporate spending, I am not your friend. While I love you all, these decisions are based on what's best for this company. If insurance costs continue to escalate at this rate, it's a real possibility that we will have to ask you to start picking up the additional costs, or even opt to take insurance with higher out-of-pocket costs and deductibles. The thought of this frustrates me - not because of the social injustice of it all, but rather for the reasons I've already cited.

Over the coming months, we might be telling you that your health insurance will be changing. We may or may not ask you to choose from a list of alternative coverage plans. Or, maybe nothing of the sort will happen. We may find that the best deal for the level of coverage we want, in order to keep our employees happy and productive and in our corner, is the deal we presently have. In the meantime, let's all agree to do whatever we can to continue to offer a learning experience that is attractive enough to cause customers to want to give us their money.

On April 1st, 2009, VTC will renew our contract with Anthem Blue Cross/Blue Shield. In so doing, we will absorb a 13% increase over 2008 costs.

Thanks for all you do,

Keith Provost
President VTC, Inc.
Creators of Quality Software Training
http://www.vtc.com
tweet - keithatvtc


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exporting courses from vtc to blackboard and other systems

If you are looking for an easy way to include a course in your LCMS, for example blackboard, that does not require the user to login, here's how to do it.

Once logged in to vtc.com, go to the course page you want, in this example, Photoshop CS4 and look at the right panel for a link that says export course lessons as HTML













this generates a html page, that you can then add into any system. You can also change anything on that course page using any html editor. All the links to the movies are encoded with the username and password, but be impossible for anyone to see that.

Macworld Expo

We are making some changes to VTC - basically, expanding our remit to include IT recruitment - the jobsite side of VTC had been done a year or so ago as a subdomain, but now we are integrating it fully into the VTC site. paying subscribers will be able to post unlimited job vacancies, and it's free to anyone to post their resumes. We'll even give out a free course for anyone who posts their resume.

We will be launching the new site at Macworld Expo in San Fran - Keith and the team will be there giving demos and we have some guest authors appearing too. We took the large stand left by Belkin, so we should be easy to spot - right next to Apple.

If you want to come say hello, I shall be demoing on the other side of the VTC stand, showing off iplotz, a new wireframing tool we developed over the last 6 months.

See you at the show!

eduslide to go open source

I've decided to make eduslide open source, so within the next few weeks expect a redesign of the front page of eduslide.com, and downloads of the source code. eduslide.net will still be up there for public creation of content and we will be offering hosting packages and custom development for those that need it.

Over on vtc.com, we have modified different parts of the website - we have added the user wishlist and voting section, so if you really want a title produced, vote for it or if you don't see it there then add it and see if others want it. The titles rising to the top of the list will get produced first (if we can find authors for it!). If you are an author, you'll be able to select which titles you'd like to work on from that list.

If anyone wants to say hello to us in person, we are at the NAPP show in Las Vegas from 3rd to 6th September.

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.