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