See full press release: WiZiQ Goes Premium
WiZiQ’s premium service is available at an annual price of $49.95. To get started, both--teachers and students can
sign up at http://www.wiziq.com/Register.aspx. If you are already a member, you can simply upgrade after logging in to your dashboard.
We have already had some great sessions like Introduction to Lean Thinking and Starting with Linux already in July and we have some interesting public sessions lined up for the month of July. Here is a brief snapshot of some of our upcoming sessions:
So, take your pick and stay tuned. We have even more activity lined up for August.
Introduction
WiZiQ has a great feature, which we currently call Public Sessions. Public Sessions are talks, lectures and discussions by eminent educationists, thinkers and thought leaders on various topics, in a multimedia interface.
The aim of the Public Session is to create a vast library of publicly accessible eLearning sessions on various topics. A Public Session is accessible to everyone with an Internet connection [and soon on iPods as well]. Hence, we invite and welcome teachers who have experience teaching in their specific fields.
Some very popular Public Sessions have been delivered through WiZiQ. Most of these sessions are introductory sessions which provide a beginner’s perspective on a particular topic. However, some of the sessions are delivered in a series and are slightly advanced.
Publicity for the teacher
Each of the sessions is publicized by our Internet Marketing team. All teachers generally have a fan following and communities of their own, where they market the sessions as well. This ensures that all Public Sessions are made visible in targeted channels on the Internet, and thus give a teacher’s skill and knowledge a new platform and exposure, as well as contribute to the publicly available knowledge on the topic. As a lot of people register for these Public Sessions, it further strengthens and builds the teacher brand. Your talent, expertise and knowledge get a further visibility and you get known as a reputed brand for your subject/ topic in the educational community.
Attracting students worldwide
It could even get some people interested in learning in detail from a teacher to contact them. As these sessions are accessible from around the world and our Virtual Classroom provides the facility to teach and learn online from anywhere in the world, the potential student could be right across the world. Hence, this can be a perfect way to attract student leads to launch your online teaching career, if you don't already have a good user base to start with.
A powerful platform to build a career
Online teaching in some ways is different from classroom teaching. For a teacher starting out with online teaching, Public Sessions can help you gauge feedback from a wider audience. This would help you organize and design your online course material better. Theoretically, more the Public Sessions you can deliver, the wider the audience feedback would be. You could even benefit from feedback from teachers in the same subject and build up your contacts further. Very soon, we would be launching our reputation system and teachers who would have delivered a public session would be ranked higher. This builds up your reputation as an expert in your field, which would further help you get more exposure and students.
It is a perfect way to share with the world your experiences and thoughts. That is what teaching is all about, above all.
Vikrama Dhiman
We would like to announce that today (25th of June) we upgraded our Virtual Classroom. The classroom now has a clean new interface, which is more user-friendly with easy upload and content sharing, new whiteboard conception, new chat box, and many more things. With the new changes at the backend the online classroom is also faster than it was in the old version as it is made using Adobe Flex technology.
So, to start at the beginning…
We created a totally new outlook for the whole classroom, choosing colors which are good for the eyes, new icons and clear shapes.
In the old version many times it was a problem to read the text after a long chat but now the chat-box is resizable. Other changes are the multi-line input box and also the option for text-size to be modified. In the premium service you can also send private messages in any session through the same text box, but by specifying an attendee or classmate.
No more Whiteboard tab or Content tab as it was in the old Virtual Classroom; we put them together in one, the Whiteboard. Next to the new tab button you can find the Content Manager and the Content Upload icons. Using these you can easily get your documents and pictures into the Virtual Classroom from the Content Manager or directly from your desktop.
If you take a closer look, you can also recognize two arrows for undo and redo. If you made a mistake like deleting something, you can easily redo it.
If you uploaded a PPT, Word/Excel Document or PDF, which has more than one page you can navigate between the pages with this new navigation. We also had it in the old version, but now it’s more visible, and has bigger icons for easy clicking.
As you can see we have some more new shapes for easy drawings for teachers/students talking about mathematics, geometry, physics, etc. These shapes make it easier to communicate for teaching/learning these sometimes hard subjects.
Now, if you opened a tab, you can also close it, just click on the right side of the open tab where the red X appears.
Recently, sometimes it was hard to change the color and the size of the shapes. Now with this new design it’s just a few clicks to familiarize the shapes you want to use.
Now we made the audio/video transfer easier for the teacher as it’s just one click to transfer control to attendees, and you can choose to transfer just audio, or audio&video. Transferring whiteboard control to attendees will be available in the premium service so it won’t be visible to everyone.
Teachers can extend the lesson with an easy click anytime during the session in different timings like 5, 15, 30, 45, 60 minutes.
Hope you like this new design and we invite you to share your opinion or suggestions about the Virtual Classroom to enable us to develop it in a way you like it! Just leave a comment here or in the WiZiQ forum.
Session Scheduling will be temporarily unavailable for an hour on June 25, 2008. Here is the maintenance schedule:
Central Time (US & Canada)- Tue, Jun 24 11:30 PM to Wed, Jun 25 12:30 AM,
GMT- Wed, Jun 25 5:30 AM to 6:30 AM,
IST- Wed, Jun 25 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM
We regret the inconvenience.
