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.

first beta finally up

We've finally got our first beta up and all beta users emailed with the details - we did have beta.tutorom.com as a link, but we've gone ahead and made the actual site live at www.tutorom.com.
We've put in the VTC computer tutorials, playable for free up to the third chapter as on the main vtc.com site, and then after that it will ask for your VTC credentials which it will then remember for future. In a few days we shall make it possible to make up your own courses using the VTC movies, so you can mix and match lessons with your own content as well.
Again within a few days we will load up the school educational content we have created so far, and we have a team of about 30 people creating more.
We have a lot more features we will be adding in the near future, including development of a flash based lesson creator. For those familiar with Scrum, our first 2 weekly Sprint is starting next Tuesday. We are planning on having new features released every 2 or 3 weeks. I'll probably talk about our experiences with Scrum in later postings.

small delay...

Small delay while we move the servers over, and on top of that, it's a long weekend for our developers. We should have the beta running on Thursday or Friday this week, at beta.tutorom.com - That gives us a little more time to fix any last minute bugs we find while testing, and fine tune certain areas.

I've been learning more about Scrum framework for future development - it looks great so far, but I shall say more on it later once I have got it all straight in my head..:)