vtc.com

Another Reason VTC Is Successful

noreply@blogger.com (Keith at VTC) — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 16:59:00 +0000

~~~

The following memo was recently sent to VTC.com employees:

Dear Fellow VTC Ninjas,

For the past decade, Mark Vernon and I have been in total agreement that the company should and will provide the highest quality employee health insurance available. Unlike a growing majority of small businesses nationwide, we've managed to continue to pay this benefit, despite soaring costs. From 1999 through 2008, the cost to VTC to pay for your health insurance increased by well over 100%. Every year around February, our insurance broker sends us a letter stating that our premiums will increase on April 1st.

Every year, without fail, our insurance rep comes in for a meeting. We go over the increased costs, and I usually get pretty testy. Sometimes, I'll throw something, but the rep is never impressed because they see this reaction all day long. Then, every year in March, the broker recommends that we consider dropping from Anthem's premium Key Care 10 coverage to Key Care 15, or 20 or something less. This would lower our costs, and place more of the burden on our employees, they explain. In our last such meeting, this was presented as a "good way to get employees to make more cost effective health care decisions". Every year, we consult with our CEO. Every year for the past decade, we have agreed to to keep Anthem Key Care 10 insurance.

Our thinking is not socialist. We do not do this because we are Bed Wetting Liberals, as I've been personally tagged right here in this office. Our rationale is based on cold calculation and hard realities. We reason that we can demand the very best from you on a daily basis, and no matter how much you complain about it, you're not going anywhere. I know that I can call you at any hour and tell you I need your help, and you'll be there - if not out of reciprocal loyalty, then out of a pressing sense that you owe us something. Yes, I know you complain. I know that from time to time you look around for other opportunities. I also know that each time you do, you only realize that you're getting a great deal here. When was the last time somebody quit VTC because there was a better job package waiting for them somewhere else? That is the reason we have continued to pay 100% of our employee's health insurance. We're in this together.

In the near future, we will provide you with a report of your 2008 insurance costs that were paid for by VTC. For now suffice to say that the cost was thousands and thousands of dollars. And thousands. Ask yourself honestly, if this were your company, would you pay those costs? Year after year, would you stare down those increases and still write those checks? If you're like most CEOs, you would not. But I would consider you short-sighted. You would continually lose employees to that better deal. Your recruiting and training costs would shoot up. Your employees would quietly not give a damn about your product or your customers.

It should be said here that we are actively seeking out alternatives to Anthem. We are talking to other brokers and exploring the possibility of joining a consortium of small businesses in order to pool employees and buy coverage at a lower, bulk rate. Make no mistake, the costs are hard and we feel it. I will not promise that we can continue to absorb these costs. My fiduciary responsibilities are not to the employees of VTC, but rather to VTC, Incorporated. If it doesn't benefit the company, we won't do it. Give me a call if you ever need help moving a sofa bed or a ride to the airport, but in matters of corporate spending, I am not your friend. While I love you all, these decisions are based on what's best for this company. If insurance costs continue to escalate at this rate, it's a real possibility that we will have to ask you to start picking up the additional costs, or even opt to take insurance with higher out-of-pocket costs and deductibles. The thought of this frustrates me - not because of the social injustice of it all, but rather for the reasons I've already cited.

Over the coming months, we might be telling you that your health insurance will be changing. We may or may not ask you to choose from a list of alternative coverage plans. Or, maybe nothing of the sort will happen. We may find that the best deal for the level of coverage we want, in order to keep our employees happy and productive and in our corner, is the deal we presently have. In the meantime, let's all agree to do whatever we can to continue to offer a learning experience that is attractive enough to cause customers to want to give us their money.

On April 1st, 2009, VTC will renew our contract with Anthem Blue Cross/Blue Shield. In so doing, we will absorb a 13% increase over 2008 costs.

Thanks for all you do,

Keith Provost
President VTC, Inc.
Creators of Quality Software Training
http://www.vtc.com
tweet - keithatvtc

~~~

exporting courses from vtc to blackboard and other systems

noreply@blogger.com (mark vernon) — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 02:01:00 +0000

If you are looking for an easy way to include a course in your LCMS, for example blackboard, that does not require the user to login, here's how to do it.

Once logged in to vtc.com, go to the course page you want, in this example, Photoshop CS4 and look at the right panel for a link that says export course lessons as HTML

this generates a html page, that you can then add into any system. You can also change anything on that course page using any html editor. All the links to the movies are encoded with the username and password, but be impossible for anyone to see that.

Macworld Expo

noreply@blogger.com (mark vernon) — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 02:47:00 +0000

We are making some changes to VTC - basically, expanding our remit to include IT recruitment - the jobsite side of VTC had been done a year or so ago as a subdomain, but now we are integrating it fully into the VTC site. paying subscribers will be able to post unlimited job vacancies, and it's free to anyone to post their resumes. We'll even give out a free course for anyone who posts their resume.

We will be launching the new site at Macworld Expo in San Fran - Keith and the team will be there giving demos and we have some guest authors appearing too. We took the large stand left by Belkin, so we should be easy to spot - right next to Apple.

If you want to come say hello, I shall be demoing on the other side of the VTC stand, showing off iplotz, a new wireframing tool we developed over the last 6 months.

See you at the show!

eduslide to go open source

noreply@blogger.com (mark vernon) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 18:24:00 +0000

I've decided to make eduslide open source, so within the next few weeks expect a redesign of the front page of eduslide.com, and downloads of the source code. eduslide.net will still be up there for public creation of content and we will be offering hosting packages and custom development for those that need it.

Over on vtc.com, we have modified different parts of the website - we have added the user wishlist and voting section, so if you really want a title produced, vote for it or if you don't see it there then add it and see if others want it. The titles rising to the top of the list will get produced first (if we can find authors for it!). If you are an author, you'll be able to select which titles you'd like to work on from that list.

If anyone wants to say hello to us in person, we are at the NAPP show in Las Vegas from 3rd to 6th September.

February...

noreply@blogger.com (mark vernon) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 21:26:00 +0000

I'm back in Australia now, after having transited the Panama canal with Maverick Dream. Meanwhile, tutorom has some new lesson types and we are about to install a couple of new servers for on2 video/flash conversion and for powerpoint/flash conversion. We've also developed live audio recording and capture and this will go public shortly. I wasn't happy with the user interface for the media browser so a few changes coming for that, as well as a lessons page area similar to the files area.

We've designed tutorom as an online lcms, with a standalone application coming later this year, but we are also working on a new site called eduslide.com, which will be a personal learning environment. Using similar tools as tutorom to create and aggregate content, it won't have a course structure as such. It will be a loose collection of your own learning content, which you can share with others if you want. This should not take too long to create since most of the work has already been done via tutorom. I'm looking forward to sharing the ideas with you as we build it.

For vtc, we've just developed some cool flash widgets to play free movies and see what's on offer. These also work with the affiliate system, so if you have registered as an affiliate and then add your affiliate code to the widget, you'll get 20% of resulting signups when anyone clicks on Learn More or any of the buttons coming to the vtc site. Check these out:

http://66.160.128.94/test/index.html
http://66.160.128.94/test/index2.html
http://66.160.128.94/test/index3.html
http://66.160.128.94/test/index4.html

Happy New Year

noreply@blogger.com (mark vernon) — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 14:25:00 +0000

Happy new year to everyone from Cannes, France. Just stopped by to visit friends and colleagues here, en route to London next week to exhibit at the Bett 2008 technology education show. We have a small stand (SW140), where I'll be looking for feedback on tutorom and vtc.com. Feel free to drop by and chat. Then onwards at the end of the week for Macworld in San Francisco where we will be demoing tutorom and vtc products. Mohan, Mathew and Dhanesh (developers on tutorom.com) will be with us from VTC India,as well as staff from VTC USA.

Having a break is always good for new ideas to come up, so here are a few that we shall probably implement...

* lesson browsing and addition from tutorom - we will then add content from around the web for you to assemble into courses or just to browse and learn.
* project manager added to admin menu on tutorom to help you build and collaborate.
* standalone version of tutorom (with all vtc educational content included) for download
* on vtc.com, addition of menu for community features - forum, chat and "ask your question", to be answered in text or video format if warranted.
* facebook application for vtc, so you can login and play content directly.

We have another 7 lesson types about to be added, including question and answer, a picture/audio slidemaker, ppt to swf converter, blog/journal, a simulation type, a poll/survey and a language lesson type. Using that last lesson type, we will also be creating English learning courses.

So, lots on the go...see you at either Bett or Macworld. After that flurry of shows, I am headed back to Maverick Dream in Aruba, preparing to cross the Panama Canal and prepare the boat for crossing the Pacific.

at berlin webexpo2

noreply@blogger.com (mark vernon) — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 15:27:00 +0000

Currently in Berlin, ready to get some feedback from the longtail pavilion at the web2 expo (http://berlin.web2expo.com/). Should be interesting. At least we have part of the system in German.

Have initiated a few changes to the menu navigation system, which will result in a simpler system. Before login, there will be just Home and Learn menus, with Learn featuring communities, courses, lessons and objects. These areas are where public items can be browsed with a quick link to upload or create directly from each section.

We are almost finished with the website creation system, so it will be easy to create your own community to display your courses and lessons. Also, almost done with the wiki lesson type, and currently working on the forum and language learning lesson types.

We've been discussing backups of lessons and data created on the system - not possible yet, but the long term aim will be to convert some of the lesson types to flash and xml, then it should prove easier to do this. The language learning lesson is the first we are doing so we shall see how it progresses.

To anyone in Berlin who is visiting, feel free to drop by the long tail pavilion and say hi.

choices...

noreply@blogger.com (mark vernon) — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 16:38:00 +0000

I've been looking around on the web, as one does, looking for other elearning companies doing something similar, and aside from tteach, which has yet to launch, can't really find anything - let me know if anyone finds anything out there similar.

By the end of the year, we'll have finished most of the basic structure of tutorom.com, although I have a dozen ideas for lesson types. I don't intend to compete with the likes of Articulate's products, but I'm sure there are plenty of simple lesson types that teachers and instructors can use, and that's where we will spend some time playing.

We are converting the swf modules for education into tutorom type slides, which means teachers can login, clone the lessons and change them as they see fit. They can also use the library of swf animations, graphics etc in their own lessons as well. All completely free.

Which reminds me. People keep asking me how I intend to make money from all this. Well...if the odd visitor signs up for a subscription to the excellent VTC software learning library, we can keep it free for the future. We'll see how it goes.

For anyone who wants to say hello, I shall be at Bett (9-12 Jan) in UK at Olympia (on a tiny stand with a big plasma, probably around the software section), and on a slightly bigger stand at Macworld San Francisco (15-18 Jan). I'll be a bit jetlagged but hey..that's normal. My lead developers Sajith and Mathew from our offices in Kochi will be there as well.

still hard at work on new features

noreply@blogger.com (mark vernon) — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 13:59:00 +0000

We decided to go back to certain parts of tutorom and change a few things. The main feature we are working on and should be finished this week, is the media browser. Different things can be loaded in and applied to lesson types as we create them - video and audio recorded, embeds created as assets to be reused, uploads of video converted to flv and in future, integration of assets from other sites such as slideshare.

A couple of weeks ago, we imported a lot of Expert Village content as embeds..but they asked us to change the way it is displayed, so we are designing a new lesson type to make it simple to add embeds, video and text. That will also allow us to create some of our own content much faster as well as display embedded content from other sites better than before.

We've also been working on a lesson type for language learning, created in flash and that should be available shortly as well. I can't wait for that to be online as I love learning new languages, and this is the way I want to both teach and learn.

For those that want to use it, we are creating an assignments lesson type, linked to online gradebook and reporting module. This should prove useful for teachers.

You'll notice a few other features here and there - little improvements that make life easier for authors and students.

I've been in Australia now for a couple of months, but this week I am headed off to Japan for a few days and then onto UK for a few weeks. As always, online wherever I lay my hat...:)

more updates, forum to come...

noreply@blogger.com (mark vernon) — Wed, 16 May 2007 15:07:00 +0000

We've made quite a few small changes on the site to make the user experience better, and we have the translation module finished. Anyone who wants to translate the site via an easy web interface gets a link at the bottom of the site in that language pointing to a special page where you can advertise your services etc.

This week we should be installing a public forum where I will be listing the features we have planned, so anyone can comment on them. Next week, we plan on installing the on2.com flix engine for converting uploaded video to flash as well as another module to convert uploaded powerpoints to flash. And if we have time, installation of flash media server so we can offer real time recording of audio and video.

So..plenty of things happening - hope to get some feedback via the new forum.

plans to improve search this week

noreply@blogger.com (mark vernon) — Sun, 06 May 2007 11:00:00 +0000

Thanks for the feedback so far for tutorom - we've fixed a couple of small bugs, and will be fixing a couple more on Monday.

One of the main things we shall be doing this week is to filter the search results after clicking on channels - they will all have featured, popular and recently added headers for the display. Also, when you search via the search box, it will only find within the channel previously selected (if any). We'll be adding a country/language code for each course linked to the user language preferences so you'll only see your courses in your language.

At some point in the near future we shall be adding the ability to display only the channels you are interested in (as well as adding more channels as demand grows).

I'm sifting through blog postings about the site, and I'll comment later on some of things said - some good ideas coming in that we can think about and perhaps implement.

first beta finally up

noreply@blogger.com (mark vernon) — Fri, 04 May 2007 18:04:00 +0000

We've finally got our first beta up and all beta users emailed with the details - we did have beta.tutorom.com as a link, but we've gone ahead and made the actual site live at www.tutorom.com.
We've put in the VTC computer tutorials, playable for free up to the third chapter as on the main vtc.com site, and then after that it will ask for your VTC credentials which it will then remember for future. In a few days we shall make it possible to make up your own courses using the VTC movies, so you can mix and match lessons with your own content as well.
Again within a few days we will load up the school educational content we have created so far, and we have a team of about 30 people creating more.
We have a lot more features we will be adding in the near future, including development of a flash based lesson creator. For those familiar with Scrum, our first 2 weekly Sprint is starting next Tuesday. We are planning on having new features released every 2 or 3 weeks. I'll probably talk about our experiences with Scrum in later postings.

small delay...

noreply@blogger.com (mark vernon) — Tue, 01 May 2007 08:32:00 +0000

Small delay while we move the servers over, and on top of that, it's a long weekend for our developers. We should have the beta running on Thursday or Friday this week, at beta.tutorom.com - That gives us a little more time to fix any last minute bugs we find while testing, and fine tune certain areas.

I've been learning more about Scrum framework for future development - it looks great so far, but I shall say more on it later once I have got it all straight in my head..:)

servers and stuff

noreply@blogger.com (mark vernon) — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 00:32:00 +0000

I am en route now back to Australia - had a great time for the past week working with my developers, as things always seem to get done a little faster when I am with them, rather than remotely. This is because any ideas, problems can be discussed and resolved immediately, rather than wait for everyone to be online to discuss.

We set up the rack of servers a few weeks ago with Level 3, since they are down the road from us in Virginia, but they haven't lived up to their promises, so this week we are moving them over to Hurricane Electric in Silicon Valley, where our current stack is set up for vtc.com. We've never had any real problems with Hurricane, so we'll stick with them for now. I'm looking at using Amazon S3 for storage expansion if we need it. I have no idea really how much we'll need, I guess that depends on how busy we get :-)

This week, I've been thinking on integration with other sites such as slideshare.net, splashcast.com and zoho.com, asking for the API to hook into tutorom. It should be straightforward, and means users will be able to use other services to create content and bring them together in a course. Slideshare in particular, is good for uploading powerpoint slides and your own content to create great looking presentations. Splashcast, with an all flash interface, looks pretty good as well. Be good to hear about feedback on these and other sites you want us to integrate with.

Once we get the servers moved over early this week, I'll be sending out the beta url for the site to everyone who asked to test the site, and uploading the educational content for viewing.

tutorom progress

noreply@blogger.com (mark vernon) — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 05:48:00 +0000

I'm in India right now, working alongside my developers, with the very capable Sajith leading the team here. We are a week away from giving out a private URL to everyone who has registered for the beta, then the site can get hammered a bit to sort any obvious issues.

So far, we have 3 lesson types that can be used..a single/multiple page editor with automatic navigation bar, URL type, and media type (flash, quicktime, etc). The collaboration side has the forums, chat and groups side but not the Wiki yet...there is a todo list as long as my arm, but first things first..:-). It's all looking quite good so far, a lot easier to use than our previous LCMS. All the movies from VTC are in there, and there will also be about 400 educational school movies, and a new course on Accounting Fundamentals, which will be in the Business & Finance Channel.

Next week I shall be at VTC Australia, there for a couple of months, and I shall email out the private URL and post it in this blog. Hope to get lots of feedback from everyone.

noreply@blogger.com (mark vernon) — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 03:32:00 +0000

Some of our members might remember me from a few years back, when I first started VTC - I used to do all the tradeshows in the mid 90's, but when I moved the office from Silicon Valley to Virginia, I took a bit of a back seat, at least in the USA. Anyway, I'm back in touch with everyone via this blog at least, looking forward to feedback and comments.

We've been busy for the last few months with development of tutorom.com, which we hope will introduce some useful features for VTC members, as well as a central place to create new content.

For the last few years we have been developing our own Learning Content Management System, but only really marketed it in South Africa, where it does quite well. But looking around, I thought perhaps we had to rethink the ideas, make it simpler and start from scratch again, which is what we have done with tutorom.com. I've looked at products like moodle for ideas, as well as keeping en eye on Web 2 developments . The basic idea was to allow VTC members to rearrange lessons as they saw fit, and communicate with other members via chat, forums etc, but it's grown to encompass a bit more. So now we shall have a site where anyone can create content, mix and match it with ours or just offer their own courses and lessons, all free of charge.
However, we have to fund it, and encourage people to contribute content, so we'll share the advertising income or give control of advertising to you (you get 100% of the income or choice not to show any ads) with a subscription to VTC. As a member you will also be able to sell courses via the site as well. The site will also be a place where we can develop other courses, other than the computer training for which we are known.

I had hoped for a launch March 1st, but I've decided to change the collaboration section, so there will be a delay of a few weeks. But here are a few ideas to let you know what you'll be able to do once it's up and running.

For public courses, the home screen will show random, recently added, popular and featured courses, with links to more. There will be a search facility and also the ability to browse courses via tags, or channels and categories. Any public courses will be indexed by google and users won't have to register to take them - not unless the creator has specified it.

Once you register, you can then add bookmarked courses to your Learn tab and this is also where courses to which you have been given access appear.

The Create tab is where you can create your content - to start with we will offer editing tools to create a one page site, multi page with navigation bar, links to other tutorom lessons, or to external content URLs. You'll be able to upload graphics, swf files, videos and more. This is where I would really like to get some feedback as to what lesson types everyone wants.
Once the site has been launched we shall add other types of lessons - eg: flashcards, forums, chats, wikis, quizzes and direct links into other sites like zoho and slideshare. You'll be able to control access to a course or each lesson, so perhaps one user would have a different viewing experience to another.

In the Collaborate area, we thought to offer something similar in layout to the Create area, but with different elements. A user will have a WorkFolder area (anyone got a better name for this let me know!) that can be organised into folders. In this area, wikis, forums, chatrooms, webpages, links to other sites and more will be added as modules. We plan on offering mini applications of our own, (eg: project manager, to do list, brainstorming area, shared whiteboard), as well as integrating with as many services as we can out there, especially if they have APIs. You control access to each of these workitems and they would show in another user's SharedWorkFolder tab for viewing or editing.

We shall be including the entire library of over 55,000 VTC computer tutorial movies within the tutorom site, although you will need to be a member of VTC to watch anything after the third chapter of each title. However, we will be delivering hundreds of flash swf lessons we have created for school subjects such as maths, biology, physics etc. We are still continually creating this content, so more will be added every week. These will all be free and anyone can mix and match their own content with them.

Here are a couple graphics to comment on - please be gentle..:-) a lot of the background coding has been done on this, we are just deciding the interface to present it all.