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!