The Never Ending Game

I have to confess, I am a bit of a college football sports nut. I could and have spent hours upon hours watching college football, enjoying every incredible reception and mind boggling run. In sports you deal with absolutes: the field is this size, quarters last this long, if there is an overtime it is structured so there is a definite victor for the contest.

But in software development there are no absolutes. It is a free flowing, ever changing, lets make the best possible product that people are asking for and deserve never ending game. To my delight, the professional developers and team leaders we have on LearningZen always gear up and follow through with their assignments. It really is an amazing process to see how thoughts and suggestions become reality through the dedicated work ethic and drive that these individuals display. None of us on the LearningZen team is a professional athlete, but with out hesitation, I would defiantly choose these individuals for my team and never trade them away.

B.J. Ockey - Support

Our Field of Dreams

We have all heard the movie saying “If you build it they will come”, from Field of Dreams. Everyone on the LearningZen team has also heard this soft whispering in our ears. We have seen the vision and dreamed dreams of a revolutionary e-Learning site. We have believed that there is purpose, meaning, and a great need for this type of platform. We have plowed under our metaphorical corn field and built a first-class learning site that is now ready for users.



Although there may be people that rebuff and question the investment of building LearningZen, we can see the users (players) on the LearningZen ball field already. Can you see them? Our users are emerging from the surrounding corn field of e-Learning products, most of which are difficult to use, very costly, and don’t provide the needed value to their users. Our users are enjoying the youthfulness of the game, creating learning content easily and effortlessly, without being hampered by the limitations of other LMS products.



This quote from Terence Mann in the move speaks directly to me at this time:

"Ray, people will come Ray. They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom. They'll turn up your driveway not knowing for sure why they're doing it. They'll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past. Of course, we won't mind if you look around, you'll say. It's only $20 per person. They'll pass over the money without even thinking about it: for it is money they have and peace they lack. And they'll walk out to the bleachers; sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. They'll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they'll watch the game and it'll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they'll have to brush them away from their faces. People will come Ray. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh... people will come Ray. People will most definitely come."

Come revive your past hope of an easy-to-use e-Learning site! Realize the content creation peace that you have been lacking! Come dip yourself into the magic waters of LearningZen!

Validity of Online Learning

Online Learning is one of the fastest growing trends in educational uses of technology. We certainly have bought into the trend and see the value. But is it as effective as face-to-face learning? Is it effective as a supplement to face-to-face learning? These and other questions are answered in a very interesting study on online learning and I felt the need to share some thoughts. This study is very applicable to what we are doing here at LearningZen. For those that want to read the full report, this is the link: Evidence-Based Practices. I just want to share some of the key conclusions that pertain to LearningZen.

• Blended learning, or a combination of face-to-face and online learning has been shown to more effective than just one or the other.
• When used by itself, online learning appears to offer a modest advantage over conventional classroom instruction.
• It was the combination of elements including additional learning time and materials as well as the opportunity for collaboration that produced the observed learning advantage in online learning.

This appears to me to be significant and while nothing absolutely validates our approach, it does give us hope. The hope is that for the vast majority of small and medium sized companies where resources don’t exist for the design and implementation of a blended training program, online learning and collaboration through a tool such as LearningZen will bring the desired results. Likewise, personnel that are responsible for training and development do not need to worry that they are giving up effectiveness by going to an online learning solution.

This is great news for all of us and we hope that you will find value in joining us in this revolution in learning.



Dennis Phillips, Ph.D.

While the Cat's Away...

This week the development team has been without one of its key members, Thomas Klassen. As developers we sometimes fall into being opposed to the idea of management, as if we are children needing to be babysat. While Tom has been away this week, the developers have come to more fully appreciate the many roles he fulfills - particularly that of writing the weekly development blog!

Our progress this week has been good as we continue to press forward on the pay-per-course features. Much of the payment system has been finalized and is working quite well. I always get a bit of a high when testing payment transactions because I can submit and approve enormously high dollar amounts!

In addition to the payment functionality, the majority of the payment reports have been designed and written. Reports seem to be the heartache of developers everywhere, but I'm pleased with the progress I've seen thus far.

As Tom mentioned in his last blog, we are working on a charity piece as part of the course payment system. This feature is mostly complete and has shaped up nicely. An author can easily choose a charity and a percentage to donate with a few clicks - all with "live" feedback displaying the amounts that will go to the author and charity. It's a great feature to get nailed down and provide to the community.

The team looks forward to getting this next release out to the masses and we all hope to see more great features and feedback in the future.

Jeff Greenland, Developer

Reach Out And Touch Someone

You know that I didn’t come up with this catch phrase. I believe it was either AT&T or one of the other baby bell companies and it had to do with picking up the phone and calling someone. I remember how it used to be a big deal for me to call home from college or some other far away place. Now, we purchase phone plans for our children that have no long-distance charges and use no minutes. These ophones just come with a heavy dose of "guilt" when not used on a daily basis to "Phone Home ET!".

So we reach out in different ways now. I really admire those that put themselves on the line of reaching out. I have been engaged in reaching out and learning more about professional teachers. Jane Hart, the founder f the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies has created a directory of learning professionals. It is a list of over 1,100 dedicated educational professionals that put personal information about themselves online. These are brave people!

Over the last two weeks I have tried to reach out and meet some of these professionals. My manner of doing it is to go to their personal website or blog, read about their interests and activities and then introduce myself by commenting on their blog. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. One interesting person I found is Tolga Özdemir. He probably has a wonderful website, unfortunately it is all in Tukish (I think). I was able to determine that Tolga is a SCORM expert with a ton of experience about LMS content creation. So I took him at his word and asked a few questions on the topic. WOW! He not only knew his stuff but was friendly and responsive. I was happy to meet Tolga and hope to keep the dialog going.

I met several other people and made similar overtures. I hope that I get a chance to talk further with them. They are brave people and willing to tell all about themselves to anyone willing to read. That is courageous.

I also reached out to one of the new users of LearningZen.com, Daisy. Daisy was kind enough to say some nice things about her experience on LearningZen. She said “I might have useless information about how to dress for work, how to have table manners, how to network with strangers or how to apply make-up if you're asian. And lately, I've become obsessed with sharing such information through the use of this website, www.learningzen.com which enables you to make your own online courses. … Instead of facebook stalking, you can create a course about some useless information you have that in turn, is actually useful for someone else. Call me a dork - but I had more fun creating my online course than I do populating a budget...” We won’t call you a Dork (otherwise it would apply to me also!). To read all of Daisy’s post on LearningZen, go to her blog, Daisies Don’t Have Thorns…

I have to say that this social networking thing is addictive. I am truly enjoying the process of “reaching out and touching someone.”

Dennis Phillips, Ph.D.

LearningZen Premium Services are Live!

We launched Premium Services last Monday. The launch went very smoothly and was a huge success, in my mind. We delivered all of the functionality we intended for the first round of Premium Services. The team also worked very hard to address all of the medium and high priority issues prior to launch. All of the team worked extra over the long 4^th of July weekend to make this happen. Thank you all for this. Your commitment to the project is admiral.



So, what functionality did the Premium Services launch contain? First, and foremost, we built the ability for portal owners to contain and protect their courses. Courses created inside of a secure portal are not visible on the public site. Portal owners can create courses for their employees or clients that they do not wish the general public to see. Portal users (students) can track their course taking using their own private bookshelf, in much the same manner as they do on the public site. In addition, we created the ability for portal administrators to customize their portal in a number of ways, including creating their own course catalog, controlling authoring permissions, customizing the look and feel, reviewing their purchased packages, and authorizing users for the portals. Finally, we created a secure signup process for portal owners to purchase portals. The process is completely driven by the user and they can complete the transaction any time - day or night.



So, what is next for the development team? We have just started a new sprint where our main focus is to build the ability for authors to charge for their courses. This feature will be available both on the public site as well as within a portal. We will still support free courses, but authors will be able to set a price for a student to take the course. We are still working out the specifics, but a portion of each student’s revenue will flow back to the author. We are also working another very cool and related feature, where an author can designate that a percent of their proceeds would be paid to a charity of their choice. This feature makes me proud to be part of a company that facilitates giving back to our communities.



Again, thanks for reading and as always, please post your comments and feedback.



Thomas Klassen