BEFORE YOU HIT ‘RECORD’…..Quickly run through a checklist:

Writing/Script

• Have your outline in front of you on actual paper    –    Why old-fashioned paper? Because viewers will be confused if they hear you typing but don’t see it on their screen. Also you can scratch out items as you cover them.
• Know what the on-screen text summaries or labels will be, and say them out loud.
• Early in video, mention specific groups of viewers that would benefit from the tutorial.
• When it’s time to promote video, you already know where to start.

Video & Lighting (for live shots)

• If you find it hard to do your lines and look straight at the camera, then put it slightly up and to the side of whatever screen you’ll be reading from.
• Late-morning natural lighting is a subtle way to increase viewers’ attention spans.
  • Conversely, if you record at 2am in your mom’s basement, and they watch it at night, they might get sleepier sooner.

Screen Considerations (for screencasts)

• Disable Desktop Notifications / Growler      (No one wants to see your software update reminders)
• Don’t move your cursor around if you don’t need to.
• If the video is internet-browser heavy, clear out your history or use other browser.
  • Viewers can’t pay attention if they’re curiously focused on your customized auto-fill suggestions
  • Leave enough blank space at bottom for on-screen text boxes and the subtitles below them.

Sound

• Say to yourself 3 times, “I will not type loudly on my keyboard, I will not type loudly on my keyboard…” Seriously people, some of you need to buy newer keyboards…

  

• Avoid excessive air movement from fans, air conditioning, or open windows
• Keep the microphone (and your distance to it) constant.
• If you don’t know what to say, then shut up.

Instructor Promo: Upload an original video tutorial on FYnderFY and get $50! Check it out

Before selecting classes, students usually ask around to see which instructors they think would be best for them. They might ask people they know who’ve already taken a class from a certain professor, and then try hard to get in that class. This may not always work out for the student, who may have selected a professor for the wrong reasons. For the instructor, however, it always works to their benefit by filling up classes early with the kinds of students who research professors before they choose their classes.

How Online Instructors Use This Lesson:

Relying on traditional “word of mouth” can take years before seeing big results, or can be nearly impossible on a larger campus. Online instructors have chosen instead to incentivize their students to talk about class topics outside the classroom, where they will naturally turn into discussions about the class itself. While this is usually in the form of social media posts, it can work just as well on a real campus setting. An example might be requiring students to gather responses on a certain question from 5 people outside the class. Since college students are generally both lazy and predictable, you can be assured that they will mostly ask other students on campus.  

Lesson 2: Students Pay More Attention if THEY provide the material

Of course, it’s up to YOU how you use that material. It’s not always practical or even beneficial to watch 5 different 10-minute-long YouTube videos, rather than 1 concise 50-minute documentary. But the documentary that you think is most illuminating isn’t necessarily the most memorable or interactive for the students.

Lesson Plan Idea – Online Video Suggestions

Instead, upload or link to the video beforehand, and ask students to vote or comment on the most important parts, the least important parts, and to suggest YouTube alternatives to those parts they thought were bad.

If enough students say that a certain 7-minute section is unimportant, and also suggest a couple alternatives that combined are no more than 7 minutes….you have just increased both the quantity and quality of information your course provides. (But how has ‘quantity’ increased since the next class is still only 50min long? you might ask. Well, yes, except remember that many of the students also watched the original 7-min section as well as some YouTube videos they wouldn’t have seen otherwise).

Lesson 3: Students learn best when they’re forced to correct themselves.

For a student, intense focus on writing a particular paper or solving a particular problem only goes so far. They also need to be able to stand back and re-evaluate what they’ve written, and then feel compelled to correct the mistakes they’ve made. I remember some of my professors in college would offer extra credit for fixing your errors and turning in your paper for a second time, or even assign different points to a 1st and 2nd draft. Whichever way you do it, the lesson is clear: don’t let them just glance at their grade without forcing them to identify and correct the mistakes they made. Otherwise, they’re just going to make those mistakes again on the final.

Lesson from the eLearning World:

Every time a student gets a certain item wrong, two things should happen:

– Almost immediately, they should have to correct their response and resubmit.

– Before the next test, they should somehow be reminded of what types of problems they struggled with last test.

Lesson 4: Getting more students means you should be getting more money.

This is both very controversial and completely logical. I’m not saying that real-life instructors should be paid based solely on the number of students they teach. I’m saying that all things being equal (such as experience, subject matter, etc), no instructor should be expected to teach the same material to more students but without additional resources.

How Online Instructors Deal with This:

As instructors online get more students, they don’t just get more student/class fees, but they also get a larger percentage of those fees. Perhaps because online learning platforms are easier to shop-around on than brick-and-mortar universities, there has been an intense competition between eLearning platforms, which has resulted in a surprising level of maturity and innovation for such a young industry.

Lesson 5: Use Answers from the Last Class to write Questions for the Next Class

Similar to Lesson #2, this says that learning experiences arrive most organically when both the instructors and the students are dealing with something new. Instructors can stay much sharper and more relevant when constantly having to interchange the variables, while keeping the overall lessons intact.

How Online Instructors Implement This:

It is usually effective enough to simply ask students to provide a link to an article or video that best demonstrates a particular lesson or relates most to a previous article, and perhaps have them describe why they chose it. These are basically suggestions on what to provide the next semester’s students with, even if just part of a study guide or extra credit for contributing high quality responses.
FYnderFY has several promos running for new online instructors (including $50 for original posted content!) Sign Up Here

Click here for promo details

Why? Cause jobs are old-fashioned, out of style, and don’t pay very well. Gigs, on the other hand, are where it’s at. They pay more money for fewer hours, and actually help your kid’s career….not to mention they look great on resumes.

What am I talking about? How can a bunch of random gigs for concerts, websites, and catered events help out a resume? Well, let me show you some examples….

Little Joey’s Post-Graduation Resume

Attention Video Tutorial Producers: If you love Udemy, then you’ll love FYnderFY. Check out our promos for new instructors and content creators! see post

LinkedIn endorsements prove how much people want to quantify their skills. Unfortunately this program has also proved just how difficult it can be to achieve this in a non-spammy way.

When LinkedIn added the endorsements feature in 2012, it immediately became one of the most popular parts of the site, and a great way for LinkedIn to generate more traffic. After all, what is an endorsement but a convenient excuse for LinkedIn to send you a notification email inviting you to come check out the endorsements your unemployed brother-in-law just gave you? That, in return, quickly becomes a quid-pro-quo system of returning endorsements to the people who just gave you some.

It also became a great way to give passive-aggressive compliments to people and be silly in general. This is why so many Google results on Linkedin endorsements bring back lists of the best funny and fake endorsement examples out there. (The highly-technical skills of “Chewing Gum” and “Sleep” are my favorites).

Of course, some endorsements are actually pretty good litmus tests for the employee skill they describe. At the top of this list of endorsement skills is, of course, the skill of “endorsements,” which is actually a skill you can give an endorsement for.

Despite all these problems, a strong showing in endorsed skills that are directly relevant to the job being applied for – such as ‘website design’ or ‘creative writing’ can go a long way to demonstrating a candidate’s authority in a particular arena. Even more telling than just the number of endorsements is the relative frequency and diversity of endorsements versus the LinkedIn connections the candidate has.
Perhaps the most fundamental flaw in LinkedIn endorsements is that its development appears to have been entirely abandoned by the social media giant. The endorsement feature has the same basic counting structure it did when it was released in 2012 (one person, one vote) without any deeper look into how we can quantify real-world skills. This fundamental void in the market of a trustworthy platform to quantify professional skills is at the center of FYnderFY’s reason for being.

Unfortunately for eager learners, this growth in content has not been accompanied by significant improvements in the ability to demonstrate these skills to potential employers. So without these improvements in employment prospects, who is there to pick up the slack? Bogus certification sites, mostly.

These sites can range from laughably amateur to downright unethical. It can be hard to determine which is which, since the more bogus certifications they sell, the fancier-looking websites they can afford. (Our list below is oriented towards the humorous rather than the dishonest ones, which we will cover more in later articles)

This should be a wakeup call to both the eLearning and human-resources communities. There needs to be a reliable and flexible skill-tracking system that is both useful for employers and fair to job-seekers. We at Fynderfy hope to be a big part of this solution by helping people quantify and track their professional skills, which in turn allows employers to better qualify their applicants.

But enough seriousness about the solution. Let’s have some fun looking at the problem, shall we? Here are some the most ridiculous online certifications we’ve seen.

Top 5 Ridiculous Online Certifications

Online Bartending School Certification

Unless your bar highly values recipe memorization, bartending school is pretty useless. But online bartending school has to be about as useless as one of those tropical drink umbrellas.

Energy Medicine, Quantum & Vibrational Healing Certification

I have a sneaking suspicion that this certificate won’t significantly improve your chances of becoming the surgeon general.

Microsoft Paint Certified Professionals

I thought this was a joke at first until I saw some of the really cool graphics they’ve made. ‘Certified’ might be a stretch, so they should just call themselves “People who have wayyyy too much time on their hands and should really get better image editing software.”

Crystal Viewing Teacher’s Certification

Trying to see the future in a crystal ball is old-fashioned and ridiculous. Seeing alternative realities in remote locations with regular-shaped crystals on your forehead, however, is a much more scientific approach.

Real Intense Outcome Certification

What is this ‘intense outcome’ they talk about? The amount of weight you might lose from all the twerking and violent convulsions in their workouts?    link

It should be said that there are also many high-quality and well-intentioned sites out there that provide self-branded certifications (self-branded contrasts with accredited professional certifications such as Java or Oracle which are more rigorous in their standards and are generally open to independent review). They can be useful for self-help style motivation and some employers may actually like them because they demonstrate desire for improvement, even if the certification may not help with quantifying that improvement.

Have you seen any crazy online certifications advertised lately? Help us add to this list! Send any submissions to contact@fynderfy.com

Instead, if they wanna stare at a computer screen for hours on end, they could at least be  learning something at the same time, maybe even something that looks good on their resume. Better yet: a specific, practical skill that will continue paying dividends for years to come.

5 Summer Skills for Teenagers

• WordPress Web Designer

Why Web Design?: WordPress is the most popular website and blog foundation on the Internet, and there are tons of high quality online courses out there that offer some sort of official certificate.

Tip: Many courses require building your first website anyway, so give your teen some suggestions on a local business or charity that could use help creating or updating their small website.

Where to Get Started: Find a real life instructor in your area with services like HandsOnWP or WPTrainingCourses.

• Become a Certified Wilderness First Responder

Why be a Woofer: Quick! How do you make a splint?! Well, after taking the WFR

course, your teen will know what to do when medical emergencies happen hours or even days away from medical help. As an added bonus, all Wilderness First Responder (WFR) graduates apparently get to call themselves a ‘Woofer’.

Where to Get Started: The National Outdoor Leadership School, NOLS, has many programs throughout the year across the country.

• Online Marketing and Data Mining with Python

What’s Python? Python is a great computer language to learn for those who haven’t learned how to code before. After just a few days of video tutorials and guided instruction, your teen should be able to impress professors and friends alike with their newfound ability to gather immense amounts of publicly available information online. Python is possibly the most business and marketing-oriented computer language out there, which is probably why YouTube is powered by Python.

Where to Get Started: Have your teen take a free course at Code Academy, then be sure to promote their newfound skill on FYnderFY, where potential employers are waiting to find candidates with certain skills.

• Certified Social Media Expert (No, seriously…)

Just because your teen spends all day on Facebook doesn’t make them a social media expert, anymore than watching ESPN makes you a professional athlete. Social media directors and coordinators are still some of the most in-demand professional positions, and companies have trouble finding qualified talent.

Where to Get Started: With just one or two certifications from places like Hootsuite University or the Online Marketing Institute.

• Teacher of English as a Second Language (TESL)

  As the world adapts to an increasingly English-based labor market, the demand for English teachers has skyrocketed. Learning how to teach English to others is a great skill that shows potential colleges and employers commitment, patience, and mental agility.

Where to Get Started: Many TESL certification courses are aimed at international travelers, since many English tutor jobs are overseas. For more, check out GoOverseas or TESOL.org.

And remember…whatever skills, talents, or certifications your teen picks up over the summer break, make sure they promote them on their FYnderFY profile.

If you’ve ever needed a little push to join the eLearning Revolution, consider this both a push and a pull. People are now taking so many certification courses online that eLearning sites have been forced to fill their course catalogs with public video tutorials from YouTube.

After adding some multiple-choice questions as a quiz, most sites slap on a price and split the winnings with whatever user created a multiple-choice quiz for that video. Most of these users are experienced instructors, but a good number of them are just amateur fans but who know how to choose the right public videos and create good questions that test the material covered.

Either way, it’s incredibly easy to create online tests and earn a residual stream of income from them. Using publicly available instructional videos to create your own microcourse is a great way to get your feet wet (and your wallet a little more full) before making full-length original video tutorials of your own.

That’s why FYnderFY is offering new users $10 for every quiz they create that tests the skills covered in YouTube tutorial videos, up to 3 courses per instructor. We are so confident that these online courses will bring us (and you) high-quality students, that for a limited time we are offering instructors 100% of all student course fees from their content. That’s really putting our money with our mouth is.

After new instructors see the earnings potential in these types of certification courses, the hope for an eLearning platform like us is that instructors will be motivated to create new, completely original content. In fact, we’re even offering $50 each for the first 100 original courses uploaded on the site.

One of the things that makes FYnderFY stand out from other eLearning sites is our focus on quantifying the skills that these online classes confer. This allows the students to show off their skills and certifications to potential new employers or even their existing employers as they move up their company’s ladder. After all, companies are finding out that not only do they need to find new employees with specific skills, but that they need to continually evaluate their current employees. Then they need to take advantage of specific skills that their current employees already have but they didn’t know about.

To create your own course on FYnderFY and start earning money from people who want to take your course, create your first course here.

We hear the terms professional digital brand and multi-profile digital brand more and more these days in business; most of the discussion stems from LinkedIn and Facebook profiles. In today’s digital world it is clear that you need to master branding across social and business networking platforms, applications and tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ and Twitter, along with new innovative players such as FYnderFY, Portfolium or about.me. These powerful networks offer unique ways to build a powerful professional image and brand across several different social and business networks, or “multi-profile digital brand(s?).” Fundamentally there should be no difference between your professional branding and the branding you seen done by top market leaders.

You Thought Only Companies Needed Branding

Are you the next Uber or Airbnb? Maybe you see yourself as the next Coke or Monster, Chipotle or Starbucks? Maybe you aspire be the next Tesla or Lululemon. It is easy to agree that those are all great brands. All are very recognizable with a branding that is consistent and perceived by many as best in class. The term branding has long been relegated to just companies; however, your professional brand and brand strat
egy should be no different than those of the world’s top and most respected brands. When it comes to your professional branding, the same basic marketing principles for companies apply.

1)   Differentiate Yourself – How Is Your Presentation?

When it comes to professional digital profiles and branding, you should be aware that you are always marketing and promoting yourself. Whether you are looking for a new career, job, promotion, client or investor, you are always selling and marketing yourself. You are unique, right? At the core of your professional brand, you need to differentiate yourself from your peers. The key word here is “professional,” so it is vital to remember that your branding needs to reflect your career or career aspirations. Also, there is no need to reinvent the wheel, look at other profiles of people you know and respect and don’t be afraid to borrow ideas or bits and pieces from those profiles. Just make sure your brand is unique to you and your professional credentials.

2)   Continuity and Consistency

This is where the term “multi-profile digital brand” comes into play. If you have multiple social and professional profiles, you can be assured that if you are being evaluated by a recruiter, boss or company that is thinking about buying something from you, or an investor or bank that wants to invest in your company or lend you money, that your name will quickly be googled with the interested party hitting every digital profile they can find on you. With this in mind, if you have profiles out there, make sure there is continuity and consistency across your profiles and that each profile has the same look, feel and key information that you feel are important to your professional brand.

3)   Keep it Fresh – Your Career Naturally evolves, Make Sure Your Brand Evolves Too

Jobs will come and go and so will your days in college, but your digital profiles will be there for life. Make sure you continually look to improve your professional profiles and brand over time. Anytime you have a chance to do something that can add to your lifelong professional brand, do it. Your brand will benefit as a result. Once you earn a degree, that key part of your profile and brand will not change; however, things like volunteer work, skills, expertise, courses taken, certifications or badges earned, industry or market recognition or awards, and experience will and should change as your career progresses. These changes have a positive impact on your professional digital brand and market value and should be reflected across your entire professional network in real-time.

4)   Don’t Get too Personal

As stated in No. 1, this is about your “professional” brand. If your brand starts to lean toward being too personal, you’ll be limiting your professional options. It’s just that simple. So it is important to keep in mind that you need to walk the fine line between what makes you unique as a person and professional, while not allowing your branding to cross into sensitive areas such as politics, religion and lifestyle choices. Your digital record will be there for life, choose what you put out there wisely.

5)   LinkedIn as the Cornerstone

While LinkedIn and its 300 million users should be the cornerstone of anyone’s professional profile brand, it is important to look at new innovative companies like FYnderFY and Portfolium as key players when it comes to a multi-profile digital brand. FYderFY allows students and professionals to build both a 360-Degree ProfessionalProfile and a Professional Credibility Score to not only showcase their professional brand, but also to qualify and quantify, and build their credit-score, for skills and expertise.

The days of working your entire career for one company are gone. Most professionals will work for more than 16 companies over their career. As discussed in the book “The Alliance”, employment has become more of an alliance, or mutually beneficial deal, between the company and an individual that lasts from as little as a few months to a number of years. If a professional truly wants to keep his or her career options open and plentiful or just command a larger paycheck than their peers, having a world-class multi-profile digital brand is the new standard.

To celebrate the launch of the revolutionary, crowd-sourced, professional-credibility verification platform, FYnderFY is pleased to offer the following awards:

$50 for the First 100 Original Content Courses

We will award $50 to the first 100 Instructors for every course, with original content, uploaded on FYnderFY. Take this opportunity and upload your course now! Be one of the first 100 instructors/educators who get awarded.

See sample course here.

Disclaimer: A minimum of 25 questions per exam, and at least 5 skills per course required. The content must not be previously published on any other eLearning/training site. The instructor must be the owner of the published content. Course can be free or for fee. Award will be paid to a Verified PayPal account; 30 days after the course is approved. Limit 3 awards per instructor. Best award will apply and cannot be combined with other cash awards. Our support team will work with you for seamless content and assessment test uploads.
See Instructor Guided Tour for more.

contact@fynderfy.com with questions.

FYnderFY is the place where individuals will differentiate themselves by actively managing and marketing their professional digital brand. Our platform offers the most eloquent skills-based verification process that puts all participants in the spotlight and encourages them to become better.

FYnderFY started as an idea 18 months ago and thanks to a lot of hard work we are now ready to share our vision with everyone else. We will share much more info about FYnderFY, and our vision, in the coming days and weeks.

Join us and start taking control of your Professional Credibility by building your FYnderFY 360-Degree ProfessionalProfile™ and your FYnderFY ProfessionalCredibility Score™.