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

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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!