Just created a LearningMeasure.com LinkedIn Group. This group is intended as a mechanism to provide feedback, suggestions, and to ask questions. The group has four subgroups, one for students, employers, educators, and consultants, corresponding to the four main account types available at LearningMeasure.com. We are hopeful that this can be used as a mechanism for you to request features, ask questions concerning courses or anything else on LearningMeasure.com, and report any problems you might have. If this works out, we may replace our internal forum with this group.
If you are not a member of LinkedIn, I highly recommend that you join. It is the best professional networking site on the web. It is all about business connections. (more…)

A new feature has been added to employer accounts. Now when your employees’ accounts expire, you can renew them. From the main employer screen, there is an option to renew expired accounts. The accounts will automatically be renewed, and you will be sent an invoice. This is the first of a few enhancements dealing with expired accounts.

Found a problem with the program registration script that may have caused some of you not to be able to register for programs. I believe this problem is now fixed. If any of you have this problem, or any other, please let me know. Problems that I do not know about I can’t fix.

Fixed some bugs on the main screen in the student area. There were some instances where the courses were not being displayed properly on the “My Courses” screen. An enhancement was also made so that when a course is overdue the background becomes red for the listing. A course is overdue if the due date has passed and either the course is not complete, or the last time the course was passed was before the due date. The intent is for when courses are assigned passed the completion date, the assumption is that the employer wants the course repeated.

Please, if you see any bug in the operation of LearningMeasure.com, let me know. If I don’t know about a problem, I can’t fix it. Also let me know if there are any feature you would like to see implemented, or any course you would like to see developed.

The LearningMeasure.com employer area has had some enhancements added. In the employee records, you can now see a listing of all assigned but not completed courses, with the ones that are overdue marked with a red background. Also the overdue course report has been sorted so the overdue courses are listed by username. This list also is linked to each employees record, making it easier to monitor your employee’s training.

There are a few more enhancements to the reporting capabilities that will be included shortly, but first some enhancements to the student accounts must be completed. Namely, the planned messaging system that is still being developed.

I have just created a new social network on Ning for LearningMeasure.com. Don’t know how this will work, but if you are interested in joining it go to

 http://learningmeasure.ning.com

I will be working with it off and on to try to see if this will be something worth putting together for our customers. Let me know how it goes, I will be deciding if it is worth developing further based on how well it is used.

UPDATE: Since Ning is discontinuing their free groups, and lack of participation, the Ning group created for LearningMeasure.com has been eliminated.

The tools now exist in both educator and employer accounts to be able to construct full courses on LearningMeasure.com. These courses are available to all designated employees or students.You can now create courses for your employees or students only, to supplement existing LearningMeasure.com content.

If you are willing to give up the rights to your course material and we agree to post the course in our general catalog, you will be allowed to have a consultant profile visible on the third page of the course, a small sales pitch on the last page of the course, and be credited for free accounts depending on the material provided.

If you have an educator or employer account, we hope you will give us feedback on this new feature so that we can improve it to make it more useful to you.
There will be more planned features added to assist with course creation over the next few months as they are completed. Clearly there needs to be some online help implemented to assist with course development, and that is our first priority. We will also be adding a feature where one can allow designated individuals to edit course content from student accounts when going through the course.

Now educator accounts have the same course creation capability as employer accounts as described in the previous post. When the final piece of the course creation process is finished, both employers and educators will be able to create full courses. This has been a feature that we have long intended to implement, but other priorities have been delaying its implementaion.

The last piece is a bit more complicated to implement, and we are in the development process, but it will take a bit of time before it is complete. When complete, LearningMeasure.com will provide essentially a simple and inexpensive online learning management system (LMS) that can be used to develop your own courses to be added to LearningMeasure.com content as part of an overall training and education program.

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.