LearningZen Launches New Feature

There is always something going on at LearningZen, and today is no exception. This month we launched a new, exciting feature that allows educators to assign CEU’s to their learners. What is a CEU? A CEU is a Continuing Education Unit, a measure used in continuing education programs to enable professions to maintain and renew their professional certifications and licenses.

We’ve made assigning these credits to courses easy, simply by putting a sub-navigation link in the General Settings. You can either select an existing CEU from the dropdown menu or type in a new name. You can then enter the units a student gets for taking the course, and they will receive those credits upon completing the exam.

Finally, LearningZen tracks earned CEU credits for both the students and the educators. As a student you simply click “Study” and then the CEU sub-navigation item. You can then see either how many CEU you’ve earned, or find new courses that grant CEU credits of a specified type.

Authors can also track the CEU credits by looking at their course statistics page. Additional tracking information has also been added to the My Students CSV exports. With this additional feature we hope to streamline LearningZen more to help organizations and communities provide education and training simply and effectively.



- Tanya Sapula

Going Dark

We are going to take a quick break from new development efforts aimed at adding new features. We need to focus a bit on SEO (search engine optimization). The results of this work, by and large, will not be visible to you, our users. We are going to spend some time doing things to improve how search engine crawlers, like Googlebot, see our site. That means we need to take a look at things like our site structure and URLs, page meta data and descriptors, page content, page titles, content available to logged out users, the way our lists present to crawlers, HTML equivalents of AJAX content, header tags…the list could go on and on. This work is not necessarily pretty, but is vital to the growth and vitality of LearningZen.

So, while we are busy opening up the hood and tinkering with the engine, please feel free to keep contacting us with your suggestions for improvement and site experiences.

See you on the flipside…

Thomas

Connections

A beautiful thing happened this week. I received emails of gratitude from several of our users. They were grateful for the changes we rolled out earlier in the week. If you have been reading this blog, you will know that many of those changes were requested by those (and other) users.

Hearing that what we are doing actually matters to our users felt really good. We work in somewhat of a vacuum, although we do try to listen to what our sales people and trainers are saying when planning functional changes.

Speaking of planning changes to the site, here is a short list of what we are currently developing:

1. We are going to change the log in process to use email addresses instead of user names. We are moving towards identifying users primarily by their email addresses. We will continue to have user names (nicknames), but they will be less emphasized over time.
2. We are adding options within portals to disable the collaborative features. We have heard from several portal administrators that course ratings, author feedback, and discussion boards may not be desired within portals.
3. We are going to take a stab at giving portal administrators the ability to assign courses to groups of portal users. We are going to take a minimalist approach to this feature to start with and see how it goes.
4. We are creating the ability for course authors to assign Continuing Education Unit (CEU) credits to their courses. Students will be able to track the number of CEU credits they have earned.
5. We progressing slowing towards our goal of giving you a seamless capability to import PowerPoint courses. At present, our next goal is to give you an easy way to embed converted PowerPoint presentations that are stored on other sites.
6. Finally, we are working on a little feature to assist with embedding of YouTube videos.

I hope these features will be helpful to you. Virtually all of these features were, once again, suggested by our users.

Thank you all for connecting with us at LearningZen. I look forward to hearing more from you.

Thomas Klassen