Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween from the LearningZen team! To my great disappointment, I don’t see any Luke Skywalkers, Captain Kirks, or R2D2’s rolling around the office today. I did my part by bringing in pumpkin seeds to share with the rest of my team, yet ended up eating the entire container myself. I’m pretty sure I ate enough to grow a small pumpkin inside of me.

Today as I was going through possible costume ideas for myself, I got to thinking; what would LearningZen.com be for Halloween? I knew immediately that it would be an animal, and it would have to be a smart one. My first thought was Elephants. Besides amazing us by painting pictures with their trunks, elephants also have an exceptional memory that allows them to actually distinguish their friends from their enemies. My next thought was a Monkey. Not are they one of the only animals capable of recognizing themselves in a mirror, but we feel they are capable enough to be sent into outer space! Still…it was too cliché.

Then as I was finally resigning the idea as silly and fruitless, it came to me; a sheep. Yes, I am referring those fluffy little animal’s best know lending their wool for comfortable socks and ponchos. Did you know we greatly underestimate sheep? British scientists actually conducted several years of research that concluded sheep actually have incredible memory and the ability to distinguish the between the faces of both other animals and humans without a mistake. The scientists even believe that their intellectual abilities are much closer to humans than we once thought!

So from the team at LearningZen.com and the LearningZen.com sheep…have a safe and fun Halloween!

Tanya Sapula

We Are Listening

Finding a new topic to blog about every week is challenging. It is hard to think of development topics that might be of interest to LearningZen users every week. I can say, though, that we are spending more and more of our development efforts responding to requests from our existing customers, which in of itself may be remarkable to some.

For instance, the current sprint contains a bunch of changes and enhancements that are a direct result of communications with our existing portal users. We have been working with at least four different state agencies as they populate their private portals. In the process of setting up and populating their new portals, they have suggested some really good and useful ideas. Here are some of them:

1. Add course completion date to the My Students CSV exports,
2. Add the ability to define portal-specific registration/account attributes.
3. Add features to the current portal list to allow administrators to reset passwords, resent activation emails, and search or filter the list.
4. Handle long names better in some of the lists.
5. Add the ability to automatically assign a batch of imported users to an existing user group.
6. Add an option to automatically email a portal designee with portal users sign up for courses.
7. Add user name structure flexibility to the import tool
8. Add administrator-specific email content to the portal import tool.
9. Require the changing of passwords after having them reset.
10. Remove some of the steps required when uploading portal logs.

I am very happy that we are able to respond to requests such as these and that we can do it in relatively short time frames. By relatively short, I mean a couple of weeks from when they were suggested to the date there are going to be rolled out.

So, your comments and suggestions for LearningZen are certainly not going to be ignored! Please let us know what you are thinking.

Thomas Klassen

Those Devilish Details

In addition to working on building new functionality, we also spend quite a bit of time focusing on fixing small issues or tweaking existing functionality to make things work just a little bit better. Every software project has a list of these types of issues that are small enough to fly under the radar for a time, but after a while they become irksome enough to demand attention. Another interesting aspect of resolving these issues is that the time to research and locate the problem often far exceeds the time to fix the problem. More than half of the battle is often just being able to duplicate the problem. Also, many of these types of issues are somewhat fleeting in nature – they are seen occasionally, but efforts to reproduce them on the sport are often fruitless and frustrating.

Each of our development cycles typically includes time to address these types of issues. The current sprint does not depart from this practice.

Here is a list of some of these types of issues that we are currently running down:

1. There is a situation with the course builder where the editor will stop being responsive and freeze up. We have occasionally heard about this issue for a while now. Based on a new reporting of this problem, I spent some time yesterday trying to duplicate it. I was actually successful and identified at least one combination of steps in Internet Explorer 7 that will cause the problem. If this happens to you before we get a fix out, try to click on another section of the course or refresh your page (F5 in many browsers). This action may reposition you to a new chapter in the course. In terms of fixing the problem, we see that the supplier of the editor we use (Telerik) has had this problem reported to them. We are going to research the issue further with them. I hope to have a fix for this by the time of our next release. If you have any experience with this problem also, please either contact support (support@learningzen.com) or comment on this blog entry. I would love to know what steps you are using to cause this problem to happen. Oh, by the way, IE 7 may report an error in this situation, which includes the code 800a025e.
   
   
2. Another issue that I know causes some of our users a bit of frustration is the loss of formatting when pasting from Microsoft Word or a web page. We are pretty dependent on our editor vendor in this situation as well, but if you have either success stories or have encountered issues in this area, I would like to hear from you.
   
   
3. We discovered the other day that the time on the certificates doesn’t reflect the local time zone of the students. We are working on correcting this.
   
   
4. We make little user interface tweaks all the time. For instance, right now we are working on widening the control that contains the list of users in a portal. Also, the current user list in a portal needs a little formatting TLC.
   
   
5. We think the file uploading process used for course thumbnails, avatars, portal logos, etc. could use a little improvement. For instance, there is not standardization in terms of how many times users need to click to save, and the controls don’t look the same in all browsers. We are working on replacing these controls with improved ones.
   
   
6. We also continually try to monitor our outgoing emails and see how spam blockers rate them. We seek to better our scores from these tools.
   
   
7. We are also redoing the course history section of the bookshelf. This is a very old part of the site (in internet terms) and really needs to be updated to be aware of all situations that can happen while taking courses.
   
   
8. Finally, we try to make our site usable in all the major browsers and versions, but sometimes we find that certain aspects of the site don’t function as well as they could on a particular browser. For instance, we are fixing a problem with the portal switcher on Internet Explorer 6 right now.

I hope that gives you some insight into our efforts to keep improving LearningZen. As usual, please comment on the blog and send us your thoughts.

Thomas Klassen

All Aboard

Once again we are embarking on a new development sprint. Taking cues from our users, we think the following new features are important to build now:

1. The ability for portal administrators to assign courses to students in a portal. It will be accomplished by assigning courses to user groups. One cool aspect of this feature will be that users who are added to a group after that group had courses assigned to it will also be assigned the same courses. We are also building a related reporting feature, which will track the completion of courses for all users in the portal.
2. Tracking of Continuing Education Units (CEU). We have been hearing for a while that the ability to simply track CEUs would be valuable. As with most features, we are going to start out with a simple approach to this feature by giving authors the ability to record how many CEUs and what type of CEUs are satisfied by a course. There will also be reporting for this at the student and educator levels.
3. OK, I'm going to commit to something here that makes me a little nervous, but we are actually going to do something with starting to automate the importing of PowerPoint documents into LearningZen. The first cut at this feature will probably involve the use of a third part site, but you will have a well-defined and directed pathway for getting your existing PowerPoint files into LearningZen. This is something we have wanted for a very long time and I'm excited to see it coming.
4. Finally, we need to redesign the course history section of the Bookshelf. This older part of LearningZen is in dire need of re-engineering. It is not aware of all of the different possibilities that can occur for a student's taking of courses. I think the new design we are talking about is going to be a very nice addition to the Bookshelf.

It is pretty early in this particular development cycle, so if you have any thoughts on how this new functionality should work, please comment on this blog and let us know what you think. Or let us know what your top priorities for changes on the site would be.

You can actually be part of building a better LearningZen by climbing aboard our sprint train!

Thomas Klassen

Selling 101

A few of us spent this week on the road starting to “sell” LearningZen.com (LZ). I put sell in quotes because all of us here at LZ are primarily software engineers, or business analysts. Selling something is not really in our nature and we are not exactly extroverts. What we really love is to build software that works well and people want to use.

I have to say that getting out of our development hideout and on the road was well worth it.

In college I was involved in the theater and had the lead in a comedy. As opening night drew near I had this horrible sense of fear. When I first read the play I thought it was hilarious. Now after rehearsing it till I was nauseous the jokes and situations had lost all meaning. Was this show even entertaining? Who picked this show? No one will believe I’m British…. But when the curtain goes up on opening night, and you hear that first belly laugh, you realize that all your hard work was going to pay off.

During our product demos this week, people were excited. There are so many ways to use LearningZen.com: Internal and external training, public and community outreach, career advancement, generating revenue, etc. In the demos the differentiators between LZ and the rest of the training market were jumping out at every turn. The system is easy to use, low cost, and built for specific training, not a semester of college. The best part - the clients were saying this, not the software geeks trying to “sell”.

The reviews are in, and I think we have a winner.

Portal Administration Redux

A big piece of the new sprint we started this week includes a revival or restoration, if you will, of simplicity to portal administration. These changes will guide new portal administrators through the processes necessary for portal setup in clearly defined steps.

As you may know, the current portal administration main landing page is very informative and even exhaustive in nature, but also a quite a long list. It isn’t the easiest to comprehend for new portal administrators. It looks like this:

Premium Services Portal

The portal tab is the place where administrators configure and set up their portal. This is the where you can configure various general portal settings like logos and course categories, authorize users and authors, and review your portal account financial information. You may use the following links to navigate directly to these areas of portal administration:

Portal Settings

Your portal settings are used to control general changes to your portal, such as logos, course categories, and portal messages.

Course Categories

Your portal maintains its own list of categories for the course catalog. You may maintain them by adding, removing, and renaming them here.

Customize My Portal

This utility allows you to select your portal's logo, which appears at the top of every portal page. You may also upload a print-quality logo for use on course completion certificates.

Portal Messages

Portal messages are free-form messages that you want to display to your logged in portal users.

Users

The users section allows you to manage portal users, authors, and user groups.

Portal Users

This tool manages your existing users, allows you to process pending registrations, and sends invitations to new users.

Authors

This section allows you to grant authoring permissions to your users.

User Groups

This area helps you organize your users into groups. Access to course categories is controlled by user groups.

Administrators

Pick the users that you want to be Administrators with this utility. This will give these users the same permissions for administering the portal that you have. Generally you will not need to add any other administrators to your portal.

Portal Account

Your portal account section helps you manage your purchases and payment history.

Package History

View your package purchase history in this section. Your package details may also be reviewed here.

Payment Information

Update your stored payment information here. Be sure to keep your payment data up-to-date, especially near your renewal date.

Payment History

Use this utility to view payment status and history for the portal.

Quite the long list!



Well, here is a sneak peak at the new portal dashboard, which will take the place of this list:

Pretty nice, huh? I think this new design provides simplicity, step sequencing instructions, grouping of steps, and highlighting of important steps, all without loosing functionality. You cannot see it here, but we also show longer descriptions for each activity when the cursor hovers over a link.



As always, I welcome your comments.



Thomas Klassen