Site Changes Just Launched

I want to tell you about a few changes we just launched. They are small changes, but I think they will help our students, educators and portal administrators have a better experience on LearningZen.com.

New My Study Page Navigation When My Bookshelf is Empty

We've made a small change to what happens when new students navigate to My Study.

On the public site, when a student has never placed a course in their bookshelf, clicking on the Study Tab, the My Study link, or the My Bookshelf link will now navigate directly to the Highlighted Courses page. The Highlighted Courses page contains several lists that will quickly help new students find courses they might want to take. These lists include courses that are most taken, highest rated, recent, featured, and suggested.

Within a portal, new students are automatically routed to the first course category in the course catalog when their portal bookshelf is empty.

Portal Certificate Preview

Portal administrators now have the ability to preview their course certificates via a new link on the print quality logo upload page. This new feature will eliminate the need to complete a course just to see how the certificate logo looks on the course completion certificate.

This new link is located on the print quality logo upload page. Clicking the new link will show either the current print logo and certificate (if it has been already uploaded), or the temporarily uploaded, but not yet saved logo (selected during the uploading process). The link does not display if the portal does not yet have a portal certificate logo.

When uploading a certificate logo for the first time, select the file using the select button, then click the upload file button. At that point, the Preview Course Completion Certificate link will appear and may be clicked.

Resized Course Creation Media Manager Windows

We've made the media manager popup windows in the course editor wider. This change allows file names in the middle pane to more fully display, which should be helpful when the beginning of file names are similar. Please also note that the left pane on this window (the folder structure) is resizable. Grab the border between the left and middle panes and drag it left or right to resize.

Designing for the Future

As we prepare for our launch early next week, we have been refactoring areas of the application and implementing new design strategies - specifically in the direction of testability. This has brought some additional vision to the overall application and has helped us review the application as a whole.

One particular benefit was that some of the unit tests quickly pointed out some areas of poor performance where optimizations can be made. These are exciting discoveries because we are always looking for ways to improve performance and, by extension, the user experience.

We welcome your comments!

Great Courses on LearningZen

We've got some really great courses on LearningZen.com right now. I want to take a moment and highlight a few of them.

Customer Service in the Restaurant Industry is not only a course about providing great customer service in a restaurant, but it also contains some really good pointers for daily life for all of us, as we interact with our family, workmates, and friends.

Food Handling Safety has more specific information than you will want to know about how to safely handle food in a restaurant and also in your home.

Hockey 101 (In Conjunction with the Utah Grizzlies) provides some basic information about the great game of Ice Hockey. This course covers a short history of the game, the basic rules and elements of the game, and defines some commonly used hockey terms.

In GPS Fundamentals for VFR Pilots, you will learn how to use a GPS for ‘direct-to’ navigation, as well as why and how to enter and modify a flight plan instead of using ‘direct-to’. Other safety and situational awareness functionality such as ‘nearest’ and how to access airport information will be reviewed as well. While there are differences between the various makes and models of GPS receivers in use, we will focus on the basic functionality that is common to almost all units.

Check these out!

Thomas Klassen

The New Blog!

We've officially launched our new blog, powered by Google's Blogger! We felt that separating our blog functionality and contents from the rest of LearningZen would allow us to be more blog "compliant" with regards to linking, searching, and following. It also frees up time for us to work on the product we love, rather than reinventing the blog wheel. Our new blog - as you can probably see if you're reading this - is located at http://blog.learningzen.com, or can be accessed by clicking the LearningZen Blog link in our header. This new blog went live with our LearningZen launch on January 29, 2010.

Other changes were also included in the launch, albeit mostly minor. This launch was focused mainly on maintenance items, but we have also added a few useful utilities for portal administrators.

Portal administrators now have the capability to change their members' account login (email address) and display nickname. Additionally, administrators may also delete portal user accounts if said user has not participated in other LearningZen activities. These two features give our portal administrators that much more control over the management of their users, allowing them to quickly make the changes which they need rather than being required to call LearningZen's support line.

As always, we are interested in your feedback and comments. LearningZen is a customer-driven application and we strive to incorporate requests from our user community. Feel free to post some comments!

Development Update

We launched the change that switched the login process to use email addresses on Wednesday of this week. It seemed to go well. I have not heard any complaints or comments from our users about this change. Please don't ever hesitate to let us know if you don't like something we have done. You can do this by emailing support@learningzen.com, posting a comment in any blog's discussion forum, or any general site forum. Rest assured that your comment will be noticed.

It is particularly important right now that you let us know what features you want or need in LearningZen. We have a lot of items on our backlog list, but we need your help in determining what makes the most sense to build.

Thank you for your support of LearningZen.

Thomas Klassen