Some of our members might remember me from a few years back, when I first started VTC - I used to do all the tradeshows in the mid 90's, but when I moved the office from Silicon Valley to Virginia, I took a bit of a back seat, at least in the USA. Anyway, I'm back in touch with everyone via this blog at least, looking forward to feedback and comments.

We've been busy for the last few months with development of tutorom.com, which we hope will introduce some useful features for VTC members, as well as a central place to create new content.

For the last few years we have been developing our own Learning Content Management System, but only really marketed it in South Africa, where it does quite well. But looking around, I thought perhaps we had to rethink the ideas, make it simpler and start from scratch again, which is what we have done with tutorom.com. I've looked at products like moodle for ideas, as well as keeping en eye on Web 2 developments . The basic idea was to allow VTC members to rearrange lessons as they saw fit, and communicate with other members via chat, forums etc, but it's grown to encompass a bit more. So now we shall have a site where anyone can create content, mix and match it with ours or just offer their own courses and lessons, all free of charge.
However, we have to fund it, and encourage people to contribute content, so we'll share the advertising income or give control of advertising to you (you get 100% of the income or choice not to show any ads) with a subscription to VTC. As a member you will also be able to sell courses via the site as well. The site will also be a place where we can develop other courses, other than the computer training for which we are known.

I had hoped for a launch March 1st, but I've decided to change the collaboration section, so there will be a delay of a few weeks. But here are a few ideas to let you know what you'll be able to do once it's up and running.

For public courses, the home screen will show random, recently added, popular and featured courses, with links to more. There will be a search facility and also the ability to browse courses via tags, or channels and categories. Any public courses will be indexed by google and users won't have to register to take them - not unless the creator has specified it.

Once you register, you can then add bookmarked courses to your Learn tab and this is also where courses to which you have been given access appear.

The Create tab is where you can create your content - to start with we will offer editing tools to create a one page site, multi page with navigation bar, links to other tutorom lessons, or to external content URLs. You'll be able to upload graphics, swf files, videos and more. This is where I would really like to get some feedback as to what lesson types everyone wants.
Once the site has been launched we shall add other types of lessons - eg: flashcards, forums, chats, wikis, quizzes and direct links into other sites like zoho and slideshare. You'll be able to control access to a course or each lesson, so perhaps one user would have a different viewing experience to another.

In the Collaborate area, we thought to offer something similar in layout to the Create area, but with different elements. A user will have a WorkFolder area (anyone got a better name for this let me know!) that can be organised into folders. In this area, wikis, forums, chatrooms, webpages, links to other sites and more will be added as modules. We plan on offering mini applications of our own, (eg: project manager, to do list, brainstorming area, shared whiteboard), as well as integrating with as many services as we can out there, especially if they have APIs. You control access to each of these workitems and they would show in another user's SharedWorkFolder tab for viewing or editing.

We shall be including the entire library of over 55,000 VTC computer tutorial movies within the tutorom site, although you will need to be a member of VTC to watch anything after the third chapter of each title. However, we will be delivering hundreds of flash swf lessons we have created for school subjects such as maths, biology, physics etc. We are still continually creating this content, so more will be added every week. These will all be free and anyone can mix and match their own content with them.

Here are a couple graphics to comment on - please be gentle..:-) a lot of the background coding has been done on this, we are just deciding the interface to present it all.