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Post details: e-learning platforms

07/02/2010

e-learning platforms

When I checked my email today, I found this question from somebody in one of my LinkedIn Groups. I always like the idea that people who are new to some technology can just ask a plain question like this in one of their favorite social networking sites. LinkedIn is a site for professionals (while facebook was meant to be a hangout to chat with friends in the first place), so I always find their group discussions very valuable.

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Don't get me wrong, I also find some interesting discussions in facebook too occasionally.

I thought I'd like to share my answer for his question here, maybe it may help some of you if you have a similar question.

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==== Edit ====
I just received a notice that you cannot follow the link if you are not in the group E-learning 2.0 at LinkedIn, so here is basically what I have written in my discussion if you can't get there on LinkedIn:

For starters, have a look at these virtual classroom platforms that I can recommend:

http://wiziq.com

WizIQ is a community for e-teaching where you can get a free virtual classroom for teaching. It's video enabled so you can use it for sending your talking head in a video, using Voip for speaking and you have a virtual whiteboard (for Powerpoint Slides) and you can use desktop sharing. Desktop sharing is a bit buggy if you don't have a superfast internet connection but the classroom is easy to use and pretty stable (most of the time).

WizIQ if free for teachers to teach free classes, if you want to give paid classes, you need to buy a $49/year premium account.

http://edufire.com

Edufire is dedicated to language learning but you can offer other classes too. It's also free for teachers to use if you do free classes. It is using Adobe Connect as virtual classroom software which is very stable and has a lot of features like video, voip, whiteboard and desktop sharing. The desktop sharing is a bit more stable than on WizIQ but I had some crashes occasionally on this platform.

Edufire had some issues with the recordings and I'm not sure if that's fixed already. If you want to give paid classes, you don't need to pay an annual fee but they take a small commission from the payments that you receive from your students. I like this business model since I only have to pay if I start earning.

http://learncentral.org

They are using Elluminate as virtual classroom. If you sign up here for free, you get a free 3-person classroom and you can give free classes on the group "host your own webinar" as long as your class is free and open for all.

Elluminate is a very powerful and stable platform. You can use video here too, but most presenters chose not to use it. The sound quality on voip is a bit lower than on the other two but the desktop sharing is very stable and fast even on a slower internet connection (I'm using good old DSL 1000).

Hope that helps so far. If you need more details, you can contact me anytime.