Launch Day

We are launching the new Premium Services pricing and packages today. The new pricing is a concept that has been on the drawing boards for a while now, and it is great to finally see it go live. We believe this will continue to position LearningZen as a revolutionary product in the marketplace and will set a new bar for low-priced LMS offerings.

The new packages will enable small businesses and government agencies to purchase a private LearningZen portal for as little as $50 a month. At that price they still get full course creation and student tracking functionality. The only thing that is limited is the amount of users in the portal. Discounted annual billing is also available, which will provide an even better value.

Oh, yeah, we are also launching a revised home page and performance enhancements today. And, we are adding a new social networking icon to allow our users to easily post links in Twitter to courses.

All in all, this makes for a pretty satisfactory release (for me).

I’d love to hear you comments and feedback on these changes.

Thomas Klassen

Sleepless in Kansas

OK, Kansas is not Seattle, but I’ve been away from the project this week. Just like Tom Hanks in the movie, I’ve been waiting up nights yearning for something. For me it is the outcome of this sprint. There was no call in radio show, only IRC and email to connect me to the development team.

I’ve had a sneak peak at the new home page. Its design is clean and informative and contains fewer columns and distractions. There are no advertisements on it, which adds to the clean look. There is a sense of simplicity and focus to it that rings pretty true for me. At a glance, users can see what we are all about and quickly navigate to see courses, start educating, or learning about Premium Services.

Speaking of Premium Services, I’m also looking forward to seeing the new section of that site that is dedicated to explaining what that is all about. There will be multiple pages here, including information on pricing, requesting a demo, understanding more about content creation, etc. Oh wait, what is this? I just went to our test site and Jeff has pushed these new pages out. Let’s see…it is pretty cool. The woman in the picture even has LearningZen up on her computer! She has that look about her – she must be thinking about all of the great things she can do with her new Premiums Services portal.

I have already tested the performance improvements we are including in this sprint. Some of them are pretty dramatic – check them out when you get a chance. They are on the home page, course listing and search pages, and the My Educate landing page.

I am most eagerly awaiting the new Premium Services package pricing enhancements, which include multiple levels of packaging and monthly or yearly billing. There are a bunch of permutations to test in this area and I’m up for the challenge of breaking it. I love getting my hands on new features and looking for things that don’t quite work as smoothly as they could. I’ll write another time about my approach to testing, but suffice it to say; it is something I take no small amount of glee from, especially when I find stuff developers say cannot happen.

As always, your comments are welcome.

 

Thomas Klassen

New Improved Shorter Sprint - Now with Fewer Features

Hey, we’ve got ourselves a new sprint! The last one is wrapped up and deployed. That one gave us a bunch of new exam functionality. I hope you all like it. Please let us know if you have any feedback on those enhancements.

OK, back to the new sprint. We have narrowed down the focus a bunch in this sprint, so it should be much shorter than the previous one. We are focusing on just a few priorities:

• Address performance issues, mainly any place courses are listed. This affects areas like featured courses, search results, courses in my bookshelf, etc.
  
• We are also working to reduce the amount of bandwidth the site requires in general. For instance, we have been able to cut down the size of what is shipped down to your browser in some instances by over 50%.
  
  
• We are creating a new area of the site to highlight premium services. This section will include pages that contain product overview information, premium services pricing, a form to request a demo, the demonstration video, content development (course creation) information, etc.
  
  
• We are also dramatically reworking the home page. Stay tuned to see this, but I think the final product will be really clean and clear. Chris Allen has given the home page really great new look.
  
• Finally, we are introducing a number of new Premium Services packages. We think these changes will make Premium Services portals more attractive to companies of various sizes, including very small ones. For instance, pricing will start at $50 a month for 1-10 users. We are also introducing the ability to pay monthly or yearly.

The combination of these new features will make our site stronger, more flexible, and attractive to wider audiences.

Watch this space for updates as this short sprint progresses and let me know what you think of the final product.

Thomas Klassen

Guest Blogger

The last time I provided LearningZen.com with a guest blog, I had been working for the company for a little over three weeks. I look back at that entry and remember the excitement and initial bewilderment I felt.

It’s been almost three months since then, and so much has happened. The most important thing of course would when I replaced my regular old office chair with the Serta Massaging Executive Chair (kidding, although I do the soothing 4 motor massage). When I look back and reflect on how much has changed; I felt a sense of pride in everything that we’ve accomplished.

On July 6^th we finally launched Premium Services which took us out of beta and opened the door to work with a new group of clientele. Since then we’ve also introduced a number of other features including the ability for authors to charge for their courses and make revenue which they can keep or donate to charity. The latest sprint revamped the entire exam making experience. You can now build course content with an exam, without an exam, or just an exam sans content.

My time here has also been chock full of completely new experiences for me. I attended my first conference, in Salt Lake City, the Outdoor Retailer’s Conference. I also went on my first legitimate business trip to Oshkosh, WI and attended the EAA’s Airventure. There I got to meet the great people from the FAA whom we partner with. Besides business, I also saw my first baseball game at Wrigley Field.

If you’ve been keeping up the development blog, you know they’ve been working hard. I had no idea what it took to be a programmer, and I appreciate the amount of work they take on. It’s not just a job to them; they are fully invested in what we’re doing. It takes long hours, and a lot of dedication on their part. We would not be anywhere close to where we’re at if they weren’t on the team. I’d like to end by extending a big thank-you to the entire LearningZen team, you’ve made this a wonderful experience for me thusfar and I couldn’t be happier to be working with you all.

Tanya Sapula

New Media Coordinator