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
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.
This isn't to you Alex.
I am a bit surprised at the response in our WIZIQ community. First there was a remarkable discussion about how hard it is to get paying students. Then the same teachers who complained about that saw that they had to pay for a slightly more robust version of WIZIQ they screamed bloody murder. "How can you ask us to pay for anything?" If it wasn't so sad I would have laughed.
If WIZIQ asks for anything, as meager as simply participating in forum discussions, let alone sharing with emails, or God Forbid paying for hard won leads of paying students, you would think they asked for someone's "first born".
It is a hard world we live in and it is very hard to build a community that is financially viable. Anyone who is looking at WIZIQ should state clearly their doubts and concerns but PLEASE, let's get past the taking offense at a for-profit business model.
Russia tried that model where all are given free everything and it didn't work. Except in scifi books, we have to be gracious to the partners who have to weigh so many needs with the individuals right to be self determining. I have been searching for a long time for an opportunity at a community like this. I doubt I will find a better one.
In closing, I can only say one thing. They are not perfect, but I have seen into their heart... and it is good.
Posted by: George Machlan | February 11, 2010 at 02:33 PM
@Alexandre Enkerli,
We in no way want to dwarf the importance of free or basic members. This campaign was not an opportunity for us to milk money or shift the crater towards Premium membership. However, it was a genuine effort to allow teachers who cannot dig into their wallets to buy our Premium membership but still thought "by draping it around, they will be empowered".
I am sure you are aware about the gate passes like the person has to be an academician and working very closely with a governmental organization or a not-for-profit institution. The catch is he/she should be willing to use this platform “not for commercial purposes”. The laundry list of such teachers, who wanted to create better surroundings, knew the way out but never had the platform, was steaming and we just didn’t reach the curve in a day. A lot of research has gone behind it before we could think of something as radical as this.
Basically, we intend to have a dedicated Premium membership for academicians. This is just a primer to test out the demand for it. The reason why one of the criteria (for academicians) says one needs to invite 20 contacts using WiZiQ’s contact list was we wanted to reach out to more teachers (who do not intend to use it for commercial purposes) and allow them to start using WiZiQ with Premium-like-features.
We cannot really work up a direct comparison with Prezi's pricing and features here as their services are quite different from ours. WiZiQ is not one tool but a set of tools. Think Virtual Classroom, Tutorials, Tests, Classes, Communities... Yes, it's a whole platform solving teaching and learning needs and yes, we want academicians to start using it and yes, all we ask for in return is that they verify their identity, spread the word out to 20 more teachers or students who could benefit, and only use it for non-commercial purposes.
About unwanted mailers from WiZiQ: If you do not wish to receive mail or want to filter out what you would like to receive, You can simply do that in your notification settings by logging in and setting your preferences here: http://www.wiziq.com/settings/notification.aspx
We really appreciate your candid feedback and will love to work with you for times to come.
Take good care
Kapil @WiZiQ
Posted by: Kapil Mehta | February 08, 2010 at 06:41 AM
Hadn't noticed that it required me to invite other people. It could have been interesting for class-based accounts (as on Diigo) but, in this case, it's a deal-breaker, for me. I sure hope WiZiQ won't start using tactics to pressure us into going premium. In "freemium" models, making the premium as attractive as possible is a much more appropriate way to make users switch than annoying users with free accounts. In this case, having an educational email account should be enough to get some kind of enhanced account of WiZiQ, even if it's not the same thing as the premium account. Prezi does it in an interesting way. Even PBWiki had a more interesting model for educators. Since I already receive way too many invitations for sessions, this might be enough to make me disable my WiZiQ account.
Posted by: Alexandre Enkerli | February 07, 2010 at 01:57 PM