Tuesday, November 25, 2014

"Nobody Reads"

I had an interesting conversation with one of my customers recently. While discussing a particular support issue she was complaining that people kept calling despite the instructions being very explicit. I said, "Have you added it to the course description?" to which she replied, "You bet I have. But that's not the issue. The truth is nobody reads!"

My customer had actually honed in on a serious problem that has become more and more apparent with the advent of the Internet. There was a time when when blogs were widely read. These days even that seems to have stopped. Readers simply write TLDR instead - "Too Long Didn't Read"

In fact, there is a Chrome plugin named TLDR which will summarize an article for you into various sizes!

From a technical standpoint, designing a user interface that makes it easy to navigate (without the need to read elaborate instructions) even for the least tech savvy user is a huge challenge. Even when you post an alert on the screen in red text users don't read and prefer to call customer support, leading to huge waste of time and energy for everyone involved. Huge amounts of FAQs, Wikis etc are generated everyday, but the reality is that users just don't have the patience to look through them. It is not surprising when the average attention time span on a website page is less than 6 secs. 

As we move further towards a hyper-connected world filled with mobile devices the attention span is likely to further plummet (especially given the small screen on phones). The challenge to counter this on all fronts is going to be hard no matter what!

p.s: I'll keep this brief lest it ends up in the TLDR category :-)

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Feature Release: Video Chat Integration!

We are glad to announce the introduction of a whole new video chat facility. We have integrated WebRTC, a free, open project which enables crystal clear audio and a rich video experience.The WebRTC integration now allows users in the system to chat among themselves and to the Admins. 

In this day and age of real time social interaction, with the video chat along with social media integration, comment system and the discussion forums, our system is now equipped with every kind of interaction options a user might need. Imagine a situation where a learner might have a doubt regarding the course content. Right now they have to rely on comments and/or emails to raise the question and then wait to hear back from the Admin. But with this new facility in place they can always initiate a chat with an Admin in a new window and get it clarified then and there itself. They can also interact with fellow students to share useful information. 

It is not just the learners that can benefit from this. The video chat also allows the Admins to reach out to certain students in real time. We are certain that this can improve the overall efficiency of your workflow. And as you can imagine, end user support becomes much more efficient if you can speak directly to the client in real time. 

With the webrtc integration, the only requirement for you to start a video chat is to be logged into the system. No additional software is required.No browser plugins are required. No additional registrations are required and as expected, you can change your status to not available or busy just in case you want to work without distractions. The video chat is compatible with the latest versions of major browsers like Mozilla FireFox and Google Chrome (IE is not supported). Since the video chat is enabled only for the users in the system, spammers will be kept out of the chat facility. If you haven't already signed up to our system, please do so now, switch ON your camera and let us know how much do you like the all new, rich, hassle free real time video chat experience. 

If you have any questions feel free to contact us at support@vitalect.com



Wednesday, November 05, 2014

The Trade off between Time and Quality

These days, especially in the world of web-based applications the trend seems to be to release a product first and incrementally fix bugs. Many such applications are free (follow the freemium model) and the early end-users (or early adopters) are often the free beta testers (or guinea pigs). In the race to launch a software product companies are often faced with the dilemma of where to make compromises. This decision becomes that much harder when not meeting a deadline could be the "kiss of death." This means that very often developers gravitate towards meeting the deadline but knowing fully well that the software being released has bugs buried in it.

The reality is that in the web-based application (SAAS) business fixing bugs and updating the software is relatively trivial in comparison to shrink-wrapped software. As a result in many cases even before the end user gets down to accessing the system several bugs could be fixed! 

We have an interesting anecdote in this regard to narrate. A customer required a specific set of features to be developed. After discussions it was agreed hat the effort will take us about two months. However, for various reason we started to slip on the target dates. We reached a point where it was becoming apparent to us that we could deliver but with some known bugs. The reality is that it could take a while before the customer and or their end-users would identify the bugs. So the question was, should we release or ask for more time despite knowing that this project was time-sensitive to the customer? We believed that "discretion is the better part of valor" and so we were preparing to prep the customer about the exact situation and sharing the known bugs well in advance of the deadline.

Thankfully, the customer came back and asked us to postpone the release (because of delays at their end) and we survived with time to spare. The product was released within the newly set deadline and the customer was happy as ever. Clearly lady luck was smiling on us in this case! 

But it might not be true every single time. So that brings us back to where we started - the tradeoff between time and quality. If you are scratching your head, don't worry, its a topic of research. 

Check out Sell First, Fix Later: Impact of Patching on Software Quality http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1028&context=heinzworks

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Webinar: eLearning Technology Platform integrated with Citrix GoTo Services

Click here to SIGN UP! It's FREE.

When: 24th October 2014, 11.00 am Pacific/2.00 pm ET)

Host and Presenter: Pran Kurup (Founder & CEO, Vitalect, Inc.)

Who should attend?
  • Anyone looking for an affordable online platform with which you can train and certify your employees.
  • Anyone looking for an integrated platform to manage self-paced, Instructor-led, Webinars
     
  • Anyone with valuable online education material (recordings in various formats, YouTube videos etc.) that you want to publish to users.
     
  • If you spend several manual hours for tracking your virtual sessions or in-person classroom data for accurate reporting and certification.
     
  • If you are unhappy with the current system simply because it cannot handle all the various types of course materials/ offerings that you provide.
Duration: 35 minutes 
Description: If any or all of the above issues are of your concern then chances are that this half an hour session might minimize a lot of your worries.

"Seeing is believing": Create and deliver various types of courses in a matter of minutes.

In this webinar  we demonstrate how an elearning technology platform could be a solution to all your e-learning needs. Within the short duration of this webinar you will see how to add various types of courses including virtual classes offered through Citrix GoTo services to the system and get a feel for the end-user experience of actually taking a course.

What can you expect from this webinar?
You get to see real products in action that real customers are using and benefiting from - The ease of use and the speed of deployment of the system that you can call your own online university!

We look forward to your participation. Thank You! 

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Taming the Video Demon

In one of our earlier posts, we had talked about the importance and significance of videos. It has become increasingly clear that the future of the eLearning industry will be ruled by videos among other things (like gamification, tincan etc). While adopting videos as your primary course delivery mechanism has some obvious advantages as discussed in that post, you are likely to run across some issues if you don't choose wisely. One such issue is beautifully illustrated in this post

As Steve Jobs predicted in 2010, flash is on the way out, being replaced by HTML5. For a browser to play videos in flash, the browser should support flash, the flash player plugin should be installed, and the flash version should be compatible with the browser version. In short, there is no standard. Before deciding to use flash as your primary video delivery mechanism, it would be a worthwhile exercise to make sure that your customers use flash supported devices, or be ready to be bombarded with flash related support queries. If you still prefer flash (due to encryption and DRM reasons), this flash help will come in handy to let your customers check if their browser supports flash, to install and to update the flash plugin. 

However, even if you are choosing HTML5 as you video delivery medium, that's no reason to rest easy. You still have to do your research. What HTML5 does, and flash lacks, is providing a web standard for playing videos. HTML5 uses semantic markup, so for starters, your browser should support the HTML5 video tag. The video element (<video>) helps you to play videos in the browser without the help of any plugins. You can check whether your browser supports the video tag here. You don't have to worry too much here, barring some old browser versions, all the major browsers support the HTML5 video now. With flash, you don't have IOS or MAC support, with HTML5 you have cross platform support guaranteed. So generally, we recommend HTML5 to our customers. However, as mentioned earlier, if you have a specific requirement like DRM or encryption, you can still choose flash. Our course building tool Techniq Portfolio is equipped to deal with both flash and HTML5 scenarios.

Please note that choosing HTML5 is only job half done. HTML5 only specifies a web standard to embed your video (using the video tag) on the web (as against converting your video to the proprietary flash format). You still have to determine which video format to use. Choosing the preferred video format is another gigantic task. Everyone have their preferred video file formats, not all of them render properly on a browser. Our system is equipped to handle all the major video and file formats out there. MP4s are the most preferred formats out there, but there is more to the picture than that. 

While choosing a video for the web, you have to look at two things. 1. the filetype or format - like mp4, flv, avi etc. 2. the video format - in other words the codec or the compression format used. Some examples include MPEG-4, H.264, VP6, VC-1 etc.

So in short, just saying MP4 is not enough, you have to specify the codec used as well. For example, MP4 with H.264 codec might work on a browser but the same MP4 with MPEG-4 codec might not work on the same browser (H.264 is just one type of MPEG-4, but we don't have to go into the details). Long story short, the video format we prefer is MP4 with H.264 codec (which is supported by most modern browsers). We strive to provide the best user experience to our customers and minimize support calls to save time (most importantly that of our customers). But 'caught in the eternal browser wars', we stumble (mostly due to no fault of ours), but the 'video demon' can be tamed with the help of informed customers and a helpful support documentation.

Contributed by Vinod Rajendran, Vitalect Customer Support

Thursday, September 25, 2014

Webinar: eLearning Technology Platform Demystified

Click here to SIGN UP! It's FREE.

E-LEARNING TECHNOLOGY PLATFORM DEMYSTIFIED.

When: 25th September 2014, 11.00 am Pacific/2.00 pm ET)

Host and Presenter: Pran Kurup (Founder & CEO, Vitalect, Inc.)
  
Who should attend?
  • Anyone looking for an affordable online platform with which you can train and certify your employees. 
  • Anyone with valuable online education material (recordings in various formats, YouTube videos etc.) that you want to publish to users. 
  • If you spend several manual hours for tracking your virtual sessions or in-person classroom data for accurate reporting and certification. 
  • If you are unhappy with the current system simply because it cannot handle all the various types of course materials/ offerings that you provide.
Duration: 35 minutes 
Description: If any or all of the above issues are of your concern then chances are that this half an hour session might minimize a lot of your worries."Seeing is believing": Create and deliver various types of courses in a matter of minutes.

In this webinar we try to address the major concerns when you are on the look out for a learning management system to manage your e-learning resources (virtual sessions or recordings or assessments).  We demonstrate how an e-learning technology platform could be a solution to all your e-learning needs. Within the short duration of this webinar you will see how to add various types of courses to the system and get a feel for the end-user experience of actually taking a course.

What can you expect from this webinar?


This is the 7th webinar in the "Vitalect's Seeing is Believing" series. You get to see real products in action that real customers are using and benefiting from - The ease of use and the speed of deployment of the system that you can call your own online university!


We look forward to your participation. Thank You! 

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Caught in the Eternal Browser Wars!

During the cold war days the British used to joke that should America and Russia go to war all the bombs will be thrown on Europe. If you are in the business of online web application development this is exactly how you would feel in the midst of the never ending browser wars.

Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome are the three most commonly used browsers (apart from various mobile browsers, Opera etc.) eternally fighting for market share. Every few months a new version of a browser is released. Besides, every few weeks these browsers undergo some fix or the other. To complicate things the ubiquitous Flash plugin (which is on its way out as a  technology) gets frequent updates too. E-learning content often uses flash and invariably something breaks. That's when the story begins.

The poor end-user who often pays for online content sits staring at the monitor expecting something to play in his browser. All he gets is a blank screen. Frustration creeps in and out goes the support email: "Fix it or give me my money back". The client forwards the same to the vendor and it goes to the application developer who has to sort it out like a puzzle from another planet. What are his issues? Well here's a start:

Say, the course material has MP4 content in one page and an MOV or a WMV in another. Not all browsers handle these formats without the appropriate plugins. MP4 and MOV plays with Quicktime player (provided they are H.264 compatible), but  WMV requires the WMV player. So the problem at hand is that "Video is not playing in the system".

He begins his job. Tirelessly goes through the fixes and everything seems to go in the right direction and hello! Here comes another case: A Mac user with a WMV content is experiencing the same issue! (for those who are wondering what's wrong with that, WMV does not play on Mac without an external plugin). 

OK, so our tech-guy fixes up the whole thing in his own style (by using custom players within the system and the like) and transfers the whole thing to the testers (translates into: thank god, it's out of my way!). The tester who has become sort of a human octopus (with 8 different browsers all around him, 5 of them being multiple versions of IE; Yes, the great IE6 included.) goes through rigorous testing and give a thumbs up. The fix goes live. The boss is happy. The client is happy. The end user who... well, still gets a blank screen in his browser. 

The whole issue re-starts. It's back to square one. The only difference is that the overall frustration levels of all the parties involved has gone up a notch. 

Sunday, July 27, 2014

Free Webinar: Course Creation made Easy!



Click here to SIGN UP! It's FREE.

Course Creation Made Easy!

When: 31, July 2014, 11.00 am Pacific/2.00 pm ET)
Host & Presenter: Pran Kurup (Founder & CEO, Vitalect, Inc.)

Who should attend
  • Anyone interested in delivering e-learning quickly and in a cost-effective manner.
  • Anyone already delivering e-learning but unhappy with their current system.
  • Anyone looking to generate revenue from e-learning. 
  • Anyone looking to issue CE credits for e-learning.
Duration: 35 minutes 
Description: Are you tired of attending Webinars where you have pretty powerpoint slides and a smooth talking speaker? 
If you answered yes to this question here is a Webinar you should be attending. 
"Seeing is believing" - so in this webinar we will show and tell - You get to see real products in action that real customers are using and benefiting from. This webinar includes setting up courses in your LMS - how they are created and uploaded to the system, how end users get access to it, payment flow, how admins can access reports, the certification process, issuing CE credits etc. 
We eagerly await your participation. Thank You!

Monday, June 23, 2014

Webinar: Vitalect's Learning Corner - A Marketplace for Courses!


Click HERE to SIGN UP! It's FREE.

Vitalect's Learning Corner - A Marketplace for Courses!

When: 27, Jun 2014, Thurs, 11.00 am Pacific/2.00 pm ET)
Host & Presenter: Pran Kurup (Founder & CEO, Vitalect, Inc.)

Who should attend
  • Those who have missed the last week's webinar or have questions about it.
  • If you have courses to sell.
  • Anyone looking to generate revenue from e-learning. 
  • If you are interested learning more about HR courses in the Learning Corner.
  • If you are interesting in learning more about Vitalect's Learning Corner. 
Duration: 35 minutes 
Description: You have courses to sell? We have the place to sell. If you are interested in publishing your courses in an e -learning marketplace and earn revenue from them then this webinar is for you.

"Seeing is believing" - If you have missed out last week then this is your opportunity. In this webinar we will show and tell - how to sell your courses via a marketplace. It can be anything ranging from presentations to YouTube video tutorials that might attract users from all around the world. We will set it up in our marketplace and you can earn revenue from purchases on those courses. We suggest you come and try it out!

Thank You!

Friday, June 20, 2014

Is a chat facility helpful in a self-paced learning environment?


Right now, with social media trending at lightning speed everywhere, the following question might sound a bit naive at first, but do you think a Chat client is an absolute necessity in a self-paced e-learning environment?

We understand that it makes sense to have a chat ability during live virtual sessions especially if the users involved belongs to a particular company or group or are discussing a common topic. Companies already use systems like Podio, Chatter, Yammer to communicate among themselves. Does adding one more chat facility in the actual training management system add more value? Or does it create one more forum where important exchanges are lost? 

The question is would it work in self-paced customer training where total strangers might be registering for courses that they can complete at their convenience? The greatest risk here is that if customers start bad-mouthing the course material or the training in general for some reason then it could have a negative impact. And then there's the question that whether end-users would prefer chatting in a professional environment with total strangers? 

Of course, there is a more positive side to it. Constructive customer discussions can lead to an overall improvement of the training quality as well.

One thing that we know for sure is that a well working chat facility can be wonderful for customer support. Users can, at any time, chat with an Instructor or an Admin who's online at that given time to inquire about the course materials and/or other doubts relating to it. It makes life so much easier. No more waiting for emails from the contact person. 

And then there is a question when it comes to selling courses online. Would you as an end user, prefer asking the opinion of an unknown person regarding a course material before purchasing it? We do provide course related forums to encourage discussions and reviews regarding course contents. Do you think that having a one-to-one chat can add more value to it?

Implementing a chat system is not difficult. In fact, its quite common place these days. There are any number of chat system already available with APIs and other functions to integrate with. But we are unsure about the value that it provides. Anecdotal feedback shows us that chat is of limited value in a self paced learning environment unless subject matter experts have scheduled hours when they are available. But in such circumstances, a full fledged virtual session via Webex or Citrix Online makes more sense instead of a simple chat facility. 

We'd love to hear your thoughts as always. 

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Webinar: Vitalect's Learning Corner - A Marketplace for Courses!


Click HERE to SIGN UP! It's FREE.

Vitalect's Learning Corner - A Marketplace for Courses!

When: 19, Jun 2014, Thurs, 11.00 am Pacific/2.00 pm ET)
Host & Presenter: Pran Kurup (Founder & CEO, Vitalect, Inc.)

Who should attend
  • If you have courses to sell.
  • Anyone looking to generate revenue from e-learning. 
  • If you are interested learning more about HR courses in the Learning Corner.
  • If you are interesting in learning more about Vitalect's Learning Corner. 
Duration: 35 minutes 
Description: You have courses to sell? We have the place to sell. If you are interested in publishing your courses in an e -learning marketplace and earn revenue from them then this webinar is for you.

"Seeing is believing" - so in this webinar we will show and tell - how to sell your courses via a marketplace. It can be anything ranging from presentations to YouTube video tutorials that might attract users from all around the world. We will set it up in our marketplace and you can earn revenue from purchases on those courses. We suggest you come and try it out!

Thank You!

Friday, June 06, 2014

Vitalect announces a new learning content partner, Vado.

6, June 2014 – Vitalect announces a new learning content partner, Vado. Vado will provide content to Vitalect’s popular eLearning platform.

Vado’s learning courses are designed to help organizations take action to develop competencies, increase engagement, and quickly onboard and socialize new employees. Vado’s content will be available through Vitalect's Learning Corner service (http://elearning.vitalect.com/learningcorner), a market place for publishing and selling courses. 

“We are pleased to partner with Vitalect to provide our unique learning content that is “changing the face of learning,” comments Cindy Pascale, Vado’s CEO. “We offer learning content in six areas: Competency Development, Project Management, Business Writing Skills, Engagement and Retention, Career Development and Onboarding. Our learning content is delivered in small bite sized chunks to maximize learning retention. Additionally, all courses include a step by step Implementation Guide leveraging the natural way people learn—on the job. Finally, Vado offers Mapping as a Service where, on a complimentary basis, we will map our learning content to a client’s competency model, engagement survey, turnover drivers, an instructor led workshop, or any learning objective a company is looking to develop.”

“With Vado’s content, learners are not only gaining new knowledge, but clear action to apply what they learned on the job. Besides, a powerful, easy to use platform combined with great content is a perfect combination to address customer challenges” commented Vitalect CEO, Pran Kurup. The addition of Vado courses to Vitalect's Techniq™ family of products is expected to kick start a productive eLearning partnership.

About Vitalect: 

Vitalect is an eLearning software solutions company focused on providing a suite of tools and technologies that help organizations effectively manage their training services. Vitalect provides the Techniq™ family of products, a robust suite of tools and technologies for delivering online training. The Techniq™ platform is seamlessly integrated with Cisco-WebEx™, Citrix®, Salesforce™, and payment gateways such as PayPal™ and Authorize.net™. Vitalect also provides the Learning corner, a market place for selling courses, where the Vado courses will be featured. The learning corner hosts courses from individual contributors to front line business leaders.

For more information, visit: http://www.vitalect.com/

About Vado:

Vado is an employee and management development e-learning courseware provider. Vado’s learning content is offered through a network of resellers spanning five continents. Vado is one of the only learning content providers whose entire library of courses is optimized for the mobile learner. 

For more information, visit: http://www.vadoinc.net/

Sunday, June 01, 2014

Re-visiting previously created courses


There is a common saying, "If it ain't broken, don't fix it." When it comes to courses, most training teams prefer to follow this theory. That is, courses that have been in use for a long time are seldom re-visited. They are in use and there are no complaints, so why bother? This is understandable given that we are all hard pressed for time in this day and age of information overload and hyper-connectivity. But the reality is that technology evolves and there are always means to improve how courses are packaged and presented.

For our part, as the provider of the technology platform, sometimes we are way too focussed on what else can be added to the product that we forget how it was like in the past and how the long-time users of our system might still be using the legacy "brick and mortar" features. We experienced something similar when we were going to move a long-time client over to our newer platform. 

They were using series courses (a collection of courses) to accomplish employee certifications. Most of the series courses were having a considerably large number of sub courses (modules). Some were having as much as 40 odd sub courses. As an end user, you are supposed to go through each and every sub course, in sequence and then take a quiz at the end of it all in order to achieve your certification. 

Can you imagine yourself taking all those 40 courses and not getting certified at the end? Actually that would be reality if you take those courses in a random order (and not in a sequence). You would be asked to take the test again since it should be the last thing to do in order to consider the series as 'completed'.

Times had changed (on our side) and this process was simplified in our latest product versions. But we never knew someone was still following this old suit until we saw it ourselves. We felt that a helping hand was necessary and we suggested an improvement and they absolutely loved it!

What we first did was to go through their sub course contents and find out how we can unify those contents so as to reduce the overall course count. We found that most of these sub courses had simple PDFs and documents as their content and many of them had YouTube videos as contents.

So we used our course developing tool - Techniq Portfolio to assemble the contents within all those 40 subcourses - that would be PDFs, PPTs, Docs, Videos, YouTube Videos etc. and create one solid single course, with 40 pages in it and a quiz at the end, that too created with TP. The result? They no longer need to use even the concept of series to accomplish their goal. Now their employees have to take only one single course in one shot to get certifications.

Wait a minute. Did I mention that we could even put timers to individual pages so as to restrict users from moving on to other pages without spending sufficient time on the current page? In short, the course was cut down, the effort was cut down. We got a happy client and  above all we were satisfied to see first hand our product's evolution coming in handy for someone.

If you are course developer or training in-charge do re-visit your old courses, you might make your end-users experience a lot better!

Monday, May 26, 2014

Webinar: E-Learning Technology Platform Demystified

Click here to SIGN UP! It's FREE.

E-Learning Technology Platform Demystified.

When: 29th May 2014, 11.00 am Pacific/2.00 pm ET)

Host and Presenter: Pran Kurup (Founder & CEO, Vitalect, Inc.)
  
Who should attend?
  • Anyone looking for an affordable online platform with which you can train and certify your employees. 
  • Anyone with valuable online education material (recordings in various formats, YouTube videos etc.) that you want to publish to users. 
  • If you spend several manual hours for tracking your virtual sessions or in-person classroom data for accurate reporting and certification. 
  • If you are unhappy with the current system simply because it cannot handle all the various types of course materials/ offerings that you provide.
Duration: 35 minutes 
Description: If any or all of the above issues are of your concern then chances are that this half an hour session might minimize a lot of your worries.
"Seeing is believing": Create and deliver various types of courses in a matter of minutes.

In this webinar we try to address the major concerns when you are on the look out for a learning management system to manage your e-learning resources (virtual sessions or recordings or assessments).  We demonstrate how an e-learning technology platform could be a solution to all your e-learning needs. Within the short duration of this webinar you will see how to add various types of courses to the system and get a feel for the end-user experience of actually taking a course.

What can you expect from this webinar?


This is the 7th webinar in the "Vitalect's Seeing is Believing" series. You get to see real products in action that real customers are using and benefiting from - The ease of use and the speed of deployment of the system that you can call your own online university!


We look forward to your participation. Thank You! 

Thursday, May 01, 2014

Pleasant Surprises during Demos

When you demo a product, you usually expect the worst to happen. Anything can go wrong here. The product could misbehave, your internet connection could be crappy, your video might go out of synch with the audio, you might accidentally forget to share screens,among other unforced errors! But when you talk to an existing customer, the challenge is a little different. Some of them bring to real life scenarios (also known as use cases) that challenge the technology from time to time. This a welcome change from the routine, "How do I do this, or how do I do that" conversation. This happens when you have sophisticated customers who quickly pick up on how to use the system and then start pushing the boundaries of technology asking interesting, deeper questions like, "In this situation,what do I do" type of questions. Sometimes you get lucky when your system is already equipped to handle these use cases, in others you return to the drawing board for a solution or a workaround.

Have you experienced pleasant surprises during demos or discussions with existing customers? Here is one where our customer figured out the solution but came back to us to just make sure she was doing the right thing. During one of their traditional brick and mortar classes (with a live instructor which we refer to as Instructor-led Training) the need for a particular document came up. The instructor had access to it and she shared it on the monitor and discussed it with the participants. But then all of the attendees requested for a copy of the same and there was no immediate solution for that besides emailing it to the attendees.

The instructor showed the presence of mind to upload the document to our platform as a course resource of the very same course that these participants had registered for. They could easily download the resource from their respective "MyCourses" page the next time the logged into the platform to download their certificate of attendance.

Additionally, there were a few attendees who did not pre-register for the class. That is, they were not on the roster but still attended the class because they showed up for it! The instructor was able to register them for the class after the session was over and then certify them via the system. So in effect, the overall registration and attendance certification process was seamless for all the attendees. 

It was one of those cases where quick thinking and a good know-how of a system helped them figure out an immediate work around for a problem, on the fly. It was a nice experience to be a part of. Have you had similar experiences? I'm sure you have. Feel free to share with us in the comments. 

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Webinar: Certification made easy!

Click here to SIGN UP! It's FREE.

Certification Made Easy!

When: 01, May 2014, 11.00 am Pacific/2.00 pm ET)
Host & Presenter: Pran Kurup (Founder & CEO, Vitalect, Inc.)
Duration: 35 Minutes

Who should attend
  • Anyone interested in delivering online certifications quickly and in a cost-effective manner.
  • Anyone already delivering online certifications but unhappy with their current system.
  • Anyone looking to deliver exclusive online tests independent of courses/training.
  • Anyone looking to generate revenue by providing online certifications.
Duration: 35 minutes 
 
Description: This webinar is for anyone looking for an efficient means to manage and conduct online certifications. With the help of our robust certification system, you should be able to manage all your certification needs now and in the future.
 
"Seeing is believing" - so in this webinar we will show and tell - You get to see real products in action that real customers are using and benefiting from. This webinar includes setting up certification tests in our system - how they are created and managed in the system, how end users get access to it, payment flow, how admins can access reports, the certification process, issuing CE credits etc. 
 

We eagerly await your participation. Thank You!

Monday, April 07, 2014

Webinar: Course creation made easy!



Click here to SIGN UP! It's FREE.

Course Creation Made Easy!

When: 10, Apr 2014, 11.00 am Pacific/2.00 pm ET)
Host & Presenter: Pran Kurup (Founder & CEO, Vitalect, Inc.)

Who should attend
  • Anyone interested in delivering e-learning quickly and in a cost-effective manner.
  • Anyone already delivering e-learning but unhappy with their current system.
  • Anyone looking to generate revenue from e-learning. 
  • Anyone looking to issue CE credits for e-learning.
Duration: 35 minutes 
 
Description: Are you tired of attending Webinars where you have pretty powerpoint slides and a smooth talking speaker? 
If you answered yes to this question here is a Webinar you should be attending. 
 
"Seeing is believing" - so in this webinar we will show and tell - You get to see real products in action that real customers are using and benefiting from. This webinar includes setting up courses in your LMS - how they are created and uploaded to the system, how end users get access to it, payment flow, how admins can access reports, the certification process, issuing CE credits etc. 
 
We eagerly await your participation. Thank You!

Thursday, March 27, 2014

The Curious Case of Videos!

Videos have always been recognized as one of the big players that would revolutionize the future of elearning. True to the hype, more and more companies are adopting videos as their primary course delivery tool. The advantages of creating courses as videos are many and varied. In terms of cost effectiveness, videos can range from very modest ones to very ambitious productions depending on the tools and budget at hand. This luxury is not afforded by many of the other course formats which may require the purchase of an insanely expensive tool in the first place.

Another obvious advantage is that virtually no effort is required to optimize video courses between platforms. A video of a certain resolution will play on almost every device that supports the resolution - whether it be a computer, tablet or a mobile phone. This is not the case with courses designed in other course authoring tools which will have to be customized for every type of device out there. So considering the device friendly nature of videos, an investment in video courses will also in a way address some of the mobile learning concerns as well. One of the few disadvantages of videos is that they haven't been as interactive in the past like the courses produced by some course authoring tools. With the popularity of interactive video format on the rise, videos have started to catch up in that area. Videos can be used as standalone courses or in association with other course resources.

Considering all this, we are proud to report that we have been giving special care to how our system handles videos. Our system supports adding a video directly as a url course or as a direct upload to the system. Our system supports a wide variety of video formats like flash videos, wmvs, mp4s, avi's etc. All these videos can be directly uploaded to the system or played remotely through a url. Our course authoring tool, Techniq Portfolio also provides the ability to import a video into a course along with other resources like powerpoint presentations, images etc.




The Techniq Portfolio also provides the ability to embed a YouTube video, stream videos hosted in remote locations like Amazon, import a Citrix or Webex recording etc. In addition to all these features, we provide a 'Related Videos' feature using which external video resources which are related to a course content can be accessed from the course details page itself. Also, our early adoption of HTML 5 ensures  that videos can be played on all HTML5 supported browsers without the headache of installing a host of plugins to make them work. As always, we will be working on developing new features and improving the existing ones. 

So stay tuned!

Contributed by Vinod Rajendran, Vitalect Customer Support 

Friday, March 21, 2014

Webinar: E-Learning Technology Platform Demystified

Click here to SIGN UP! It's FREE.

E-Learning Technology Platform Demystified.

When: 27th March 2014, 11.00 am Pacific/2.00 pm ET)

Host and Presenter: Pran Kurup (Founder & CEO, Vitalect, Inc.)
  
Who should attend?
  • Anyone looking for an affordable online platform with which you can train and certify your employees. 
  • Anyone with valuable online education material (recordings in various formats, YouTube videos etc.) that you want to publish to users. 
  • If you spend several manual hours for tracking your virtual sessions or in-person classroom data for accurate reporting and certification. 
  • If you are unhappy with the current system simply because it cannot handle all the various types of course materials/ offerings that you provide.
Duration: 35 minutes 
Description: If any or all of the above issues are of your concern then chances are that this half an hour session might minimize a lot of your worries.

"Seeing is believing": Create and deliver various types of courses in a matter of minutes.

In this webinar we try to address the major concerns when you are on the look out for a learning management system to manage your e-learning resources (virtual sessions or recordings or assessments).  We demonstrate how an e-learning technology platform could be a solution to all your e-learning needs. Within the short duration of this webinar you will see how to add various types of courses to the system and get a feel for the end-user experience of actually taking a course.

What can you expect from this webinar?


This is the 4th webinar in the "Vitalect's Seeing is Believing" series. You get to see real products in action that real customers are using and benefiting from - The ease of use and the speed of deployment of the system that you can call your own online university!


We look forward to your participation. Thank You! 

Thursday, February 27, 2014

Interesting custom requirements

Thanks to online solutions that help manage training in so many flavors - self-paced courses, Instructor-led Training, Virtual classes, Videos, etc. customers have the ability to easily maintain and track records of different learners in one centralized location. However, of late, we have come across cases where customers need to blend different types of course offerings in rather unique (and somewhat unusual) ways which we in the technology world don't always plan for.  Let me explain this via an example. 

What is a typical virtual class? It is a class that is offered online. This means that individual learners and the instructor get online in front of their respective computers for the class and participate in a live interactive class. The instructor and the learners can be physically located pretty much anywhere on the planet provided they have a computer (or mobile phone) and a reliable Internet connection. This is in short is a virtual class or an online live class. Now, here is the twist in the tale. In some locations, instead of one learner you have a room full of learners watching the class on a single computer displayed on a large monitor!  

In practice, all these people gathered in the room attending the live class are technically "attendees". But the virtual class delivery platform tracks users and their participation levels based on individual logins to the training class/session. In this case however, you have one login and many attendees! How does the system track these individual attendees when they haven't logged into the system? If you want to issue certificates of attendance how would the system handle that? 

This is where integration between the virtual platform and a learning management system can come in very handy. In our system we have a mechanism to precisely handle this scenario. Nevertheless, we must confess that we didn't realize that we had the ability to handle this scenario until one of our prospects described this scenario to us. After a little thought, light bulbs went off, and we realized we did have a mechanism to handle this without the need for any customization. In fact, it wasn't even a workaround!

In other words, this was a case of a custom requirement that needed no customization on our part! If you wish to learn more about this join our next webinar on March 6, 2014 that focuses on integration of Techniq platform with the Citrix GoToTraining service. 

Monday, February 03, 2014

User friendliness is everything!


"It's not what your product does but how it appeals to the user that matters the most."

We were forced to accept this reality a few years ago when a certain customer turned down our product with the reasoning of a "not so great UI". Our product virtually had everything that matched their requirements but yet they said that our system was not user friendly. Issues that they pointed out included:
  1. Their end users were not sure what to do after they land in our login page.
  2. Most of them had issues in entering the login information (the 'username' and 'password')
  3. Many of them did not know where to look for courses once they logged into the system.
We were scratching our heads wondering what went wrong?

For one, we had an absolutely solid on-screen message immediately after registration that said "You will receive you registration email and steps on how to login to the system in 10-15 minutes". Secondly the email that went out to the system clearly mentioned the username and password. That too in bold and within quotes.

And of course we had the "Register" page where the user should be going to register for courses. Eventually we reached a logical conclusion and started accusing spam filters and security firewalls that could be blocking our automated emails in the first place.

A few days later another client came up with similar issue. Thankfully they were much more co-operative (and are still with us after all these years). This was when the truth dawned upon us. What if the user never read the message after registration? The reality is that most people never read what is on the screen!

After some back and forth email conversations, this customer revealed that many of the end users never actually saw the on-screen message. It was amazing because the message simply was staring at them all the time in highly visible red font!

Then came the next twist in the tale. Most of those who did receive the emails were actually copy pasting the password field including the quotes in it (so much for the quotes and highlighting).

The third one was even more bizarre.

The users who had actually logged in, never thought of the "Register" link as the place to register courses. They had already seen a "Register" link on the outside (the site registration link) and therefore chose to ignore this one.

We got around all these, then, by adding these seemingly simple things to the FAQ. But we also knew that these were things that we had overlooked while setting up the product. On hindsight it was a serious mistake that cost us a client.

Fast forward. We put up "user friendliness" right on top of the list when we sat down and discussed a new version of the product. We wanted to ensure that users would not end up making mistakes simply because we set it up the wrong way.

Now we have added tooltips (those tiny little help links) wherever relevant and we have added guidelines and more prominent on-screen texts and an FAQ, that we hope, no one would ever have to take a look. And we have incorporated a contemporary design. If you need a sneak peak please take a look here.

Coming back to the topic. The simplest thing that you could do when setting up an online product (or any product that involves low tech users at one end), is to find an alien to test drive it.

OK. Not literally. By alien I meant someone who is not at all familiar with this system. It must not be your conventional testers. The idea here is that if this particular user understands at least half of your product (what it is for and how it should be used) without any external help then you are likely to have success with most of the future users as well.

In short, the idea is to think from a end user's point of view. No matter how sleek your design is - with all those sliders and roll over animations - you should know that if the end user does not know where to click in the first place then it all becomes pointless. So the best thing to do immediately after setting up the UI would be to think in simple basic terms on how this will look for a normal low tech user (Important: Think without any presumptions). You are sure to find some scope for improvement right away.

The saying: To catch a criminal you have to think like one. I believe it is applicable in delivering a successful product as well. To win the hearts of the end-user you have to think like one or find someone who does.

Wednesday, January 08, 2014

A simple lesson from a prospect to begin the year!

I had a very interesting experience the other day. I was talking to a prospect today and she said, "There are 495 other products like yours out in the market. My job is to make a shortlist and provide it to my boss." Then she went on to explain, "The first thing I do is to see if the company has updated its website of late. If it has never been updated in years then its a red flag. Then I try to see if I can go through the website and understand what they have to offer. If I can't, I move on"

If you think about it, this prospect was right on the money. If someone can't figure out what you do after spending a few minutes on the website, then you are more than likely to lose them. Besides, if you are in the business of learning solutions the least you could do is quickly educate your visitors on what is that you do. (We have used a combination of videos, a registration for a free test drive of our system and additional content)

It's amazing how much you can learn from just simply talking with prospects and customers. It might seem like stating the obvious but in the hustle and bustle of our daily activity we tend to forget and overlook the otherwise simple things. In a world, where your website is a window to the world, negligence can be costly because you might be losing a customer that you could have had by making a few simple changes to your website. 

A nice way to begin the first week of the year - with a simple lesson from a prospect!