A new feature has been added to employer accounts that allows the entry of training into their employee training records. The ability to enter and delete individual entries on the employees training record is done by selecting an employee record from the employee records page at
http://www.learningmeasure.com/employers/cgi/lmviewemployeerecords.pl

and then go to the employee entered training section after selecting an employee.

This can be used to record third party training or even in-house training. This information is editable only by the employer and not by the employee. It is also visible to anyone who would look at the employees resume, and remains on the employee’s resume as long as they are listed as an employee.

A new feature has been implemented today that has been requested by some of our employers. As of today, when an employer or an educator assigns a due date for a course, the student no longer has the option of dropping the course. This is the first of several changes that will be implemented over the next year.

Although we are continuing with course development, we will spend a little more resources on updating the site functionality over the next year. As a result, we anticipate the rate of course development will decrease during this time. Feedback will be more important over the next year, as feedback will determine which features and which courses will receive the highest priority.

We would like to help support independent consultants on LearningMeasure.com. If your consultancy is in the areas of metrology, measurement, test, evaluation, modeling, simulation, engineering, statistics … basically anything that is technical, we can provide some support. We are not looking for soft skills consultants, just technical consultants.

To the spammers out there, any profile we find that does not fit in that category will be deleted, so don’t try to promote your get rich quick scheme or medical enhancement products on this site. We are only interested in legitimate technical consultants.
We are trying to build a small network of technical consultants that we could call on to send work from our clients to.
If you are a technical consultant we invite you to join our consultant network. To do this first register as a student, and then fill out a consultant profile. This will be searchable and have a link back to your website, your LinkedIn profile, and your LearningMeasure.com resume.

If you develop any course material for LearningMeasure.com Your consultant profile will be on the third page of the course, and you can put a one page sales pitch for your services at the end of the course. We are looking for short training courses, roughly 50 self-contained powerpoint slides on technical topics. Anything on specific instrumentation would be great, as well as any technical topic. We just ask that there is no sales pitch in the course itself. Let us know if you are interested.

Also we are looking for consultants to interview on our podcast. Let us know if you are interested and we will try to schedule an interview.

There are several changes that will be taking place with LearningMeasure.com over the next several months.

First among these is that we will be discontinuing our free email service. There are plenty of free alternatives. and it is not part of our core business. A new mechanism for communicating with our subscribers will be implemented over the next few months. We will discontinue the email service in stages. First all accounts of non-subscribers will be purged, starting with those accounts that are more than two years overdue. Then the remaining non-subscriber accounts will be purged by Jan 1. The subscriber accounts will be purged last, and should be purged by February. New accounts will no longer create a learningmeasure.com email address effective as soon as we can finish the appropriate changes to our registration script. If any of this is a problem for any of you, let me know and we might be able to work something out.

We’ve already announced the end of the 1-week trial period ending Jan 1, 2010. Instead, a fraction of our courses will remain free to access, regardless of the status of your subscription. This should still give ample material to try out our service before committing to a subscription.

We are also thinking about eliminating our existing forum software with something that is a little more integrated into the site. Not many of you have been using the forums, so this change will not affect most of you.
For communicating with others on the site, we are planning to implement some social media like features. We will initially create a mechanism for communicating to each student with a twitter-like status interface.  This will be a mechanism to communicate between LearningMeasure.com and you initially, with more social media features added later.

Our emphasis will still be on creating course content, so these features will be implemented in stages. What we do want is more mechanisms for you to provide feedback, ask questions, and comment so that we can make  the site more useful to you.

Effective Jan 1, 2010, LearningMeasure.com will discontinue its 1 week trial period. This has been necessary because of several individuals who keep signing up for one week trials again and again under a slightly different name. We will strive to stay an the least expensive training resource of its kind, but we still have to pay the bills, and we can’t allow this behavior any longer.

Instead, we will now pick around 10% of our courses to remain available for free, which can be accessed even if your account expires. The rest will be available only through purchasing or renewing a subscription. We believe this meets the spirit of what we were trying to do having a trial period. You still will be able to take a number of courses to see how it works and decide if you want to subscribe to take the remaining courses. The free courses will be clearly marked in the course catalog and on your “My Courses” page.

We will be slowly implementing this change from now to the end of the year. Turning off the 1-week trial period will take place on Jan 1, 2010. If you currently have an expired accounts, right now you will be able to access the free courses we have initially chosen.

If you like to support this service, please subscribe, it is what allows us to continue course development and keep the website active.