WiZiQ Blog

Upgrade to WiZiQ Premium Membership Without Paying a Dime!

Here's some good news for academic teachers. We have just launched an academic teachers' special for teachers who are associated with:

• An academic institution
• A government organization
• Non-profit organization

This is a limited period offer and it ends on Feb. 28, 2010. In this special, a teacher can upgrade to Premium membership absolutely free by using an official email id on WiZiQ and inviting 20 teachers/students through the WiZiQ "Invite" feature.

Among other great features, academic teachers could specifically use unlimited recordings for class lectures to share with their students so that students can revise at their own pace with the added asynchronous option. Students who missed lectures can simply review recordings.

Contacts who subscribe through teachers' invitations will be automatically added to their contact lists. This is useful for teachers as they are entitled to more concessions when there are more contacts in their WiZiQ network. We recently announced one such concession.

To enable speedy processing of your claim:

• Register with your official email id e.g., @example.edu. You can also change your current email on WiZiQ to an official one.
  
• Verify your WiZiQ account from your official email inbox, and
• Ensure that at least 60% of your profile is complete
• Apply for the offer
  

Once all the above requirements have been fulfilled, you will be upgraded to Premium membership by the WiZiQ team. You will receive an automated email instantly with the details of upgradation to Premium membership.

So if you are an academic teacher you can get started right away. If you know teachers who could benefit from this special, send them right along! Looking forward to your inputs in this discussion on the e-teaching community.

Online Classes Updated - More Reasons to Celebrate

More reasons to celebrate :-) We are excited! The promised upgrade to Online Classes has just been released. For those who have not seen this presentation yet, here's what just changed:

New Classes Interface on WiZiQ

Uploaded by Harman-Singh on WiZiQ Tutorials

To elaborate what more a teacher gets with this new version:
Improved interface
The new look interface now has:

• A "Quick Links" section for easy navigation
• More organized class information
• Statistics, like minutes a student spent in class, number of recording views and downloads, etc.

Schedule paid Public / Private Classes
This section gives teachers more control on resources, and convenience in scheduling the class. The enhancements will enable the teacher to:

• Set up Public / Private class fees and students can enter the class only after making the payment
• Reschedule the Public / Private class that was already set up before
• Allow (with ‘Mark as Paid’ option) a student if s/he makes an offline payment, like cash or check

Resend invite to members
A teacher can resend invitation to the students as many times as required.

Choose a contact list
Teachers can group contacts, save them as separate lists, and use these lists to send invitations.

Change Class Date and Time
A teacher can now reschedule the Private Class that was already set up before, and the attendees who paid for that class will get an instant automated email about the change.

Set Recording price
Once a class is concluded, the teacher can set a price to grant access to the recording.

Recording access permissions & statistics
Teachers can allow/disallow attendees to download/view recordings. Besides, teachers can also view statistics on number of views & downloads by the members.

View Attendance Report
A teacher can view the number of minutes each student spent in the class.

Manage Class Comments
Invited students can post their comments and they get published instantly on the Class Details’ page of the teacher. The teacher can moderate to delete, report abuse, reply or keep the comments.

Review Class Feedback
A teacher can choose to display any feedback on the Class Details’ page or remove it from there.

Track your class payments
A summary report of all the payments made by students along with the details of net amount that can be withdrawn and WiZiQ’s commission are also available.

We look forward to your feedback and comments.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays - Rounding up 2009

We wish all you teachers and students a Very Merry Christmas and we wish that you enjoy your holidays and have super fun! We also wish that you get all happiness and prosper even more in 2010 and beyond.

Christmas Greetings

See more presentations by authorSTREAM | Upload your own PowerPoint presentations

The year 2009 has proved to be significant not only for WiZiQ, but also for the entire family of teachers and students. With membership growing consistently, WiZiQ has come a long way with the support and feedback from teachers and students. WiZiQ introduced a blend of rich features and add-ons in 2009 and we have even more ambitious plans for 2010. Let us take a quick look at all enhancements that happened in 2009:

Paid Online Classes - Teachers earn from Paid Classes

Some of the features in Paid Online Classes will be released tomorrow so watch the blog. Update!! [23 Dec]This release just went through. See More reasons to celebrate

• User friendly interface
• Schedule Paid Classes
• Resend invite to members
• Change class date and time
• Set recording price
• Manage recording access for each attendee
• View attendance report
• Manage class comments
• Review class feedback and choose to display on your profile
• Track your class payments

Learning Requests - Students make Learning Requests

• Submit your Learning Request
• Get unprecedented choice of teachers
• Teachers who can best handle your request contact you
• Start learning online from anywhere in the world in the Virtual Classroom via the Internet

Learning Request Alerts for Teachers - Teachers get Learning Requests

• Receive students’ Learning Requests right in your email inbox
• Get direct contact access (email & phone numbers)

Class Recordings – New and improved recordings

• Better interface
• Better synch of the audio and video
• Screen sharing recording
• Full screen view
• Swift switching with the time-line--no more slides
• Set recording price

Screen Sharing - Teachers and students share each others' desktop screens and thus share files

• Simple click start and stop functions
• Full-screen sharing
• Improved quality with faster performance and shared screens also appear in class recordings 

WiZiQ Communities - Members participate in community discussion forums

• Connect with members from around the world
• Participate in discussions and increase your visibility
• Learn from the experiences shared by other members
• Ask questions and get answers in community discussions

Online Courses - Teachers can sell courses and earn more

• Teachers can submit requests to build courses
• Courses enable teachers to consolidate and sell "learning objects" as course materials
• Variety of file formats accepted as "learning objects", like PDF, Video, Audio, PPT, Word, PowerPoint, Flash, etc.

Online Practice Tests - Teachers can create tests and students can attempt and practice

• Enhanced test creation console for teachers
• Teachers can now share tests with students and get their score
• Free-hand drawings tool added to test creation console
• Mathematics symbols also added
• images can be uploaded and included in tests now

WiZiQ for Organizations – Enterprise version of WiZiQ

• Give or attend a class without signing up on WiZiQ
• Integrate WiZiQ Virtual Classroom with your website
• Simultaneous Classes

Virtual Classroom for Moodle - (Part of the Organizations offering above) Teachers and students can interact using the new improved Virtual Classroom module in Moodle 

• No sign-up on WiZiQ is required to give or attend a class in Moodle
• High quality recordings are available for later reviews
• 30 day Trial version with up to 10 participants, 3 recordings and unlimited classes
• Choose from flexible, no-strings-attached pricing packages with more participants 

We are all ears for your feedback so that together, we can build WiZiQ and make it the platform of choice to solve all education needs.

How much can Teachers Earn with Paid Classes on WiZiQ?

So what can teachers earn by selling classes to learners on WiZiQ? We have already discussed this before. This post is in continuation of that. We would charge very little--only to cover the transaction fee and administrative overheads--if teachers help sell their own class, and charge a 'sales fee' or commission (we hope to make money this way) if WiZiQ helps sell a teacher's class. So based on this idea, here is a commission structure we decided; we will charge:

• 5% + $0.20 per sale if the teacher facilitates the sale
• 25% per sale if WiZiQ helps sell the class

Here is how we determine whether the teacher facilitated the sale or WiZiQ:

For paid private classes
Since we don't post such classes on our public class listings, we understand that they are sold by the teachers and so we will charge only 5% + $0.20 per sale.

For paid public classes
We have identified that there are 4 different ways public classes are sold:

1. Teachers invite students from their WiZiQ contact list. This way we know that the teacher who held the class and the paying student who attended were contacts; so we would charge only 5% + $0.20 per sale.
2. Teachers invite students by entering their e-mail addresses in the WiZiQ class invite box or import from their webmail accounts. This way too we know that the teacher and student were contacts; so we would charge only 5% + $0.20 per sale.
3. Teachers invite students by sharing the class URL: 1. Via their e-mail program, say Gmail or Outlook 2. By posting it on blogs, Facebook or other social networks, Moodle or their own website. This way too we know (from the URL) that the student joined the class due to the influence of the teacher and so we would charge only 5% + $0.20 per sale.
4. Through WiZiQ Public Class Marketplace where all the public classes are listed. This is where we know that the student bought the class because it was listed on the WiZiQ Marketplace, we will charge a 25% commission.

Now, in our brainstorming session, there was only one case where there was no way for us to find out if the student knew the teacher outside WiZiQ during the sale of the class. This teacher asked his students to visit WiZiQ.com, look for his class in the list of public classes and buy (register for) it. Since there is no way for us to be sure in such cases, we have decided to charge a 25% commission.

Regards,
Harman
CEO@WiZiQ

Active Teachers - Now Your Public Classes Don't Need Approval

It's a privilege to inform that many active teachers on WiZiQ now gain access to schedule and publish their Online Public Classes without our prior approval. This removes the 48-hour prior scheduling of a public class barrier for these teachers and their classes get listed instantly on WiZiQ. We’ll be personally notifying these teachers about the same through email shortly.

So if you have been considerably active as a teacher during the last 3 months on WiZiQ, you could be one of these teachers. Additionally, we would be looking forward (and being very thankful) that teachers reciprocate by:

• Providing important information for every public class with appropriate title, tags, description, etc.
• And most importantly, not canceling or missing a scheduled public class unless under unavoidable circumstances

Teachers who would be interested in availing this offer in the near future can start by ensuring that you have:

• Filled in your teacher profile up to a good percentage (70% or more) with your image
• Verified your email address
• Conducted a minimum of two Public Classes on WiZiQ

If you are currently missing the benchmark of two classes, makeup for it; send us the details with date & time of the prospective class that you want to present. If the class details are viable and good, then we approve it without delay. Whenever you achieve this milestone, you may expect an email notification from us giving you similar access for Public Classes.

More on the way for Online Public Classes

Seeing past trends, we understand that Public Classes on WiZiQ are emerging as a great networking tool for teachers to connect with new students. To power Public Classes more in this direction, Premium teachers will soon get contact-access to students who registered for a class and who attended it. Free members will only get contact-access to the students who attend their Public Classes. We hope these new enhancements help teachers connect better with students and expand their professional network on WiZiQ.