Today WiZiQ officially launched a new feature for premium members of the platform. From now on premium teachers can create and sell asynchronous, self paced courses to students.
I think this is a great addition to the existing range of features and rounds up the overall experience for teachers as well as for students on the WiZiQ platform. And for teachers who are not yet premium members this could be a good reason to opt in for the premium account.
This post is the result of several talks I had with a couple of different people in our industry during the last year. The final impulse to write this down here is on the one hand a discussion in the E-Teaching community on WiZiQ. I will mention the second impulse at the end of this post.
All this brought an idea back to my mind I already had back in late 2008. And a couple of weeks ago I discussed basically the same with Jason West, the founder of Languages Out There.
Hence today I would like to set up a simple scenario that could fundamentally change the way people in developing countries could get access to high quality education.
A long awaited feature finally made it in the WiZiQ classroom: screen sharing. According to a survey I made amongst teachers a couple of months ago screen sharing comes directly after voice quality on the must have list for virtual classrooms.
If you don’t know yet what a vanity URL is:
http://www.facebook.com/kirstenwinkler is one as well as
http://www.twitter.com/kirstenwinkler
Vanity URLs allow you to chose your own name as link to your profile and are a very important factor in Social Media. It makes it much easier to share your profile with others or to find someone in the Social Media Jungle. Remember the run on the vanity URLs on facebook a couple of months ago?
Now WiZiQ is offering vanity URLs to their premium members. Hence if you want to check out my profile on WiZiQ you only have to go to http://www.wiziq.com/kirstenwinkler.
It may seem to be a simple change but it involves a lot of positive aspects. As I said, it makes your profile easy to share and it fits the general structure of your Social Media web estate. It also builds up trust on the side of your potential students, if you use your real name as vanity URL. Overall it is an important factor for your personal branding.
Last wednesday WiZiQ organized a mini workshop about Twitter for Teachers. They invited Enza Antenos-Conforti (@iVenus), Alexandre Enklerli (@enkerli) and myself to give some presentations about how teachers can use microblogging.
It was a great event and I learned a lot from my co-presenters there. Below you can watch our presentations as well as some links to teacher related events on Twitter, some useful ebooks and blogs or watch some more videos about Twitter.
Presentation of Eza Antenos-Conforti
Presentation of Alexandre Enkerli
My presentation
I was kindly invited to present at a mini workshop about Twitter for Teachers.
When?: Wednesday, September 16, 5.30PM CEST
Where?: WiZiQ
Price?: Free
Of course, I will not be the only presenter. WiZiQ has invited a very impressive panel with
Alexandre Enkerli @enkerli
Alex is a French-speaking ethnographer from Montreal, Qc. As a part-time or visiting lecturer, he has been teaching anthropology, folkloristics, and sociology at diverse universities in Canada and the United States, including Concordia University in Montreal and Indiana University South Bend. His teaching philosophy has been influenced by his constructivist father and by diverse learning experiences. Alex pretty much lives online. Apart from diverse activities on online services like Facebook and Twitter, he participates in diverse online forums and mailing-lists, including the Moodle community at Moodle.org. His main blog is Disparate.
Enza Antenos-Conforti @ivenus
Enza Antenos-Conforti is a Professor in the Department of Spanish and Italian at Montclair State University. She received her Ph.D. in Italian Studies from the University of Toronto. Her research areas are Applied Linguistics, instructional technology, materials development, and teacher training. Currently, she is working on viable Web 2.0 alternatives to learning management systems for the second language classroom and mobile-assisted language learning (MALL). Recently she presented on Twitter at the OIT Summer Symposium at Montclair State and LARC’s Summer Institute (San Diego State University).
Really looking forward to this event and to hear the opinions of Alexandre and Enza.
I made a little promo banner for the event. So if you like, copy the code below and share it on your website or blog.
Before starting to give you my personal review I have to thank a couple of people. Let me start with Vikrama Dhiman of WiZiQ who supported me all the way from the planning to the ETCon today. I think he did an amazing job, so Kudos to you! You made the second ETCon a really smooth event for everyone involved.
Secondly I want to thank the members of the panel. Jason West of Languages Out There who did a great presentation about communities and shared emotion, Bernhard Niesner of busuu who gave us an inside view of his company and his thoughts on self regulating communities and the difference between in house developed content compared to crowdsourced content, Kevin Chen of italki who talked about problems of international / global platforms and the right member mix and last but not least again Vikrama Dhiman who explained how non educational companies use crowdsourcing and that crowdsourcing not always needs a community.
And of course I have to thank the great audience. You asked awesome questions that led to a resourceful discussion of the panel at the end. Thank you for attending the ETCon and spreading the word. I really appreciate your interest!
The second ETCon will be on August 27 at 3PM CEST. We scheduled it this time towards our attendees and panel members in India and Asia.
As last time the E-Teachers Conference will have a first class line up of panel members. This time our panelists are:
Shirley Yiong, Marketing Manager of Livemocha
Jason West, Founder of Languages Out There
Bernhard Niesner, Co-Founder of busuu
Kevin Chen, Co-Founder of italki
Harman Singh, Founder of WiZiQ
The panel will present their own point of view about the topic Communities and the Power of Crowdsourcing. The presentations will then be followed by a moderated discussion and a Q&A session with the audience.
You can ask your questions on the ETCon directly to the panel by using the classroom chat or using Twitter and the #ETCon hashtag. If you cannot attend on the thursday but want to ask a question you can also post them in the ETCon blog at http://etcon.eteachersacademy.com
The ETCon is a free event and everybody interested in elearning is welcome to join. Just subscribe for a free ticket.
The second ETCon is hosted by WiZiQ.
Follow the ETCon on Twitter @ETConference or join out twub at http://twubs.com/etcon
Yesterday I attended a class of Vikrama Dhiman about the new Learning Request System from WiZiQ, so basically about how to find students on this platform.
Although the audio was not very good I think I understood the idea 
.
And did you notice: they changed the new logo back to the old color scheme. Well done!
WiZiQ announced the start for Public Paid Classes in their blog today. They also got themselves a new look so I think it’s time to put them into the spotlight again.
In their blog WiZiQ announced that from now on every teacher can schedule public classes on his own. Before you had to apply for a public class and a WiZiQ member set it up for you.
Therefore let us have a quick look on this feature and how a teacher can use it to promote himself.
Today Myngle announced that they will launch the possibility of class sessions on their platform. The feature will be available somewhere around the 2nd of march according to their announcement.
This makes Myngle the third provider of group lessons on the internet next to WiZiQ and eduFire.
I took some days off and headed down south to Bordeaux just to relax a bit and sort some thoughts I came up with in the past couple of weeks.
There will be a recap of my trip in my private blog “My Brittany“. If you are interested how I spent my free time, you can have a look over there . And there will be a professionel recap of my decisions in this blog here, of course.
WiZiQ.com announced today that they will rename the WiZiQ Sessions into WiZiQ Classes.
Today, we take one more step to increase our relevance to education, online teaching, eLearning and teaching community. We are disbanding the use of the term “session”.
Today I had my first public session on WiZiQ.com.
Public sessions are classes with several attendees that are offered by teachers on the WiZiQ platform for free. There is a huge variety of topics available, from languages to mathematics, from exam preparation to spiritual guidance. Continue reading
