See us at the Moodle Moot USA!
Connected Shopping Ltd, owners of the well known elearning brands, Course Merchant and CourseIndex.com, have confirmed the company’s intention to present at the Moodle Moot USA this year. The event is to take place on 12th to 14th July in Rohnert Park, California. View the event website at http://www.moot-us.com
The Moot, to be held in Sonoma Wine Country, north of San Francisco, features a keynote by Martin Dougiamas, founder and lead developer of Moodle. Additional keynotes will be delivered by David Wiley, Associate Professor of Instructional Psychology and Technology at Brigham Young University, Susan Ko, author of “Teaching Online: A Practical Guide” and Michael Feldstein, Senior Program Manager of MindTap MindApps.
The Moot promises to be an inspiring and enriching 2-day conference. Attendees will collaborate with K12 and higher education colleagues using Moodle for blended and online instruction. For faculty using Moodle for student engagement to systems administrators tuning servers for optimal performance, this conference provides opportunities for everyone to enhance their use of the leading open source Learning Management System.
Connected Shopping Ltd will be looking to connect with locally based web design and elearning companies and individuals who may be interested in offering our services on a partnership basis. If you are within striking distance of Rohnert Park in July, please contact Richard on richard [at] connectedshopping.com to arrange an informal chat over a coffee and cake!
About Connected Shopping Ltd
Connected Shopping Ltd develop Course Merchant and CourseIndex.com.
Course Merchant (http://www.coursemerchant.com) is a fully featured e-commerce application which seamlessly integrates with Moodle to provide automated student enrolment upon successful online payment. Course Merchant adds e-commerce features to Moodle, such as: discounting, coupons, multi-seat purchasing, deferred payment, corporate purchasing, multiple payment gateways, bundled products, offline invoicing and affiliate marketing.
CourseIndex.com (http://www.courseindex.com) is an elearning affiliate network designed for vendors of elearning, training and educational online courses, resources, materials and webinars.
Secure your Moodle site using Packt’s New Book
Moodle Security is a new book from Packt that shows how to make sure that only authorized users can access the information on your Moodle site. Written by Darko Miletic, this book will assist Moodle administrators and teachers to protect their students and staff by securing their site from online attacks and hacks. You can visit: <a href=http://link.packtpub.com/LeiI5G>http://link.packtpub.com/LeiI5G</a>.
Moodle is a free web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites. It is designed to help educators create online courses with a focus on interaction and collaborative construction of content. Its open source license and modular design allows developers to create additional modules and features.
Moodle Security explains users how to use CAPTCHA to make sure that humans and not Spambots are creating new accounts on their Moodle site. Furthermore, they learn configuring PHP and Apache servers to protect their Windows and Linux systems from malicious threats.
Using this book, users will be able protect their site from external attacks with secure HTTP and organize regular anti-virus scans to ensure no new risks have been introduced to the system. Monitoring the security of Moodle easily with notifications and security reports and minimizing the downtime of Moodle in the case of actual damage will also be understood from the book.
Packed with practical examples, this book is ideal for Moodle administrators or lead teachers as securing their site is one of the most important things to do. The book is out now and available from Packt. For more information, please visit: http://link.packtpub.com/LeiI5G
National Skills Academy for Financial Services – Ecommerce Site Launched
The National Skills Academy for Financial Services (NSAFS) have launched their ecommerce enabled catalogue at http://www.nsafs-link.co.uk/products.html. This site allows prospective students / customers to browse the range of Financial Services related courses, choose the courses of most interest, buy them and to then immediately access the Moodle LMS system to commence learning.
A couple of new Course Merchant features were enabled on this store:
1. Approve Order link in the admin interface
Where a payment method (Purchase Order typically) is set as ‘deferred’ – students will not be auto-enroled until payment is verified by someone in authority (your finance team for example). Earlier versions of Course Merchant had this come through to the admin as a link in an email. When the order was to be approved, the link was clicked that completed the Moodle enrollment process. However, the NSAFS Moodle has a new interface in the admin where all deferred orders now list with an ‘Approve Order’ link. This means that it is easier to search and filter on such orders. It also means we have been able to combine deferred orders requiring approval with the management of multiple seat purchasing.
2. Management of Multiple Seats Purchasing
A new ‘Manage Licences’ feature has been enabled in the admin. This automatically collates multi-orders and lists the number of seats purchased per course by order reference number. When seats are to be allocated to a learner, their email address is simply entered into a form within the admin. Course Merchant then sends an email complete with all Moodle login info to the new student and at the same time deletes one seat from the running total of seats left. This has been combined with Order Approval – as we found that most multiseat purchasing was via non-credit card payment types.
Lastly, we’re pleased to welcome NSAFS into our new elearning affiliate network – CourseIndex.com. The NSAFS range of courses, covering: Financial Services Training, Mortgages, Anti Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing, TCF, Treating Customers Fairly, Retirement, Pensions, Savings, Investments, Accuracy, Insurance, Protection are now available to website owners to sell on behalf of the NSAFS so earning a commission on sale.
Free Moodle Business Courses!
We have just discovered some free Moodle courses produced by http://wbl-online.org.uk/moodle/ and made available under a Creative Commons licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Given that we here are in the business of selling courses online – that business critical learning resources may be of interest!
WBL Online is a community website for work based learning providers in the West Midlands. It is part of a region wide project to improve the digital literacies of WBL providers and their staff.
These supplementary teaching aides can assist you in setting up courses in 10 key business areas. Defined as the 10 business critical areas by the LSC for the West Midlands, UK:
Business Improvement Techniques
Business Systems/Processes
Teamworking/Communication
Customer Service
Sales & Marketing
IT User
New Product Design
Finance & Credit
Cashflow & Profit Management
Risk Management
According to the WBL Online website (http://wbl-online.org.uk/blog/2010/12/09/free-resources-online-courses/), you are free to to take a whole course and then dissect it, change it, completely modify (if you wish) and reuse it in any way you see fit.
It’s worth noting too that the courses were created using the open source authoring tool, Xerte – http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xerte/. I may post into the tech section of the blog on that when I have had chance to play with it.
CourseIndex.com Goes Live – Elearning Affiliate Network
We’re currently running a soft launch of our new elearning affiliate system – CourseIndex.com.
This is a complete and fully featured affiliate tracking software application that allows merchants / vendors of online courses to build an affiliate network to help them further promote their courses for sale.
You can join CourseIndex.com to take advantage of our own affiliate recruitment activity, or you can license CourseIndex.com as your own personal affiliate tracking solution. The difference is that you will need to recruit your own affiliates.
Check out the CourseIndex.com website to find out more about running an elearning affiliate system. CourseIndex.com works with normal Moodle installations with the Moodle built-in Paypal and Authorize.net payment plug-ins enabled.
You don’t have to be a user of Course Merchant to use CourseIndex.com. CourseIndex.com may also be used with other catalog systems, not just Course Merchant, as well as other LMS / VLE systems, again, not just Moodle.
Moodle Affiliate and Webinar Online Sale Example
Here’s an interesting example we just built out for a prospective customer.
One Moodle course is bought normally after browsing through the catalog.
Within that Moodle course is a ‘Buy Now’ link to another Moodle course – this is for a one-to-one webinar with just a single specified tutor.
So, the student buys access to a normal Moodle course, and then decides (from within that Moodle course) whether to ‘upgrade’ with a one-to-one tutorial with their instructor.
However, the link isn’t a normal ‘Buy Now’ link. It’s an affiliate link for the Instructor. So, the institution running this particular Moodle ecommerce set-up is allowing their instructors to sell additional personal online tutorials (webinars), and tracking a commission due to those instructors. It’s a kind of internal marketplace where tutors / instructors etc can sell their own personal time on top of the actual Moodle access – and be rewarded for it (at a set commission or fixed payment, etc).
Affiliate Networks Overview
You sell something on your website. Be it shoes, toothbrushes, elearning courses, software downloads, or pictures of your gran on a pottery mug… (hmmm, I might get one of those).
Now, if it’s something worth selling once, it’s worth selling a thousand times. And if one website is selling it, well, a thousand websites should be selling it. Herein lies the strength of an affiliate network – a thousand, ten thousand, heck – a million websites all selling the same item.
Build this kind of a network and you can forget Google, forget Bing – forget some pillock even hacking your own website and bringing it to its knees. You have created a distributed sales channel capable of continuing to sell your products / services regardless of what happens to your own site! It could even survive a nuclear attack – isn’t that what started the whole Arpanet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET) (Internet) thing in the first place?
In Brief
An affiliate is someone with a website. A good affiliate is someone with a website with traffic. A great affiliate is someone with a website with appropriate traffic.
The affiliate simply pastes a piece of linking code onto this website. Linking code is typically for a text link or an image link, but sophisticated affiliate software tools like iDevAffiliate use page peels and lightboxes too.
So, a potential customer is browsing your affiliate’s website. They come across the information on your product and, suitably impressed by the picture of your gran, they decide to click through to your site to investigate further. At this point the affiliate software performs its first task – it places a piece of code (cookie) on the shopper’s computer so that any resulting sales may be attributed to the correct affiliate.
Now the shopper is on your website. They like the pottery mug bearing the picture of your beloved gran – a mere £5, p&p included! So, they buy it. At the point they reach, and then pass, checkout – another piece of the affiliate software performs its job. It ‘sends’ information about the sale to the affiliate control panel, allowing the original referring site to be credited with the value of the sale made.
At some point, you will login to your affiliate management area and confirm (or reject) the sale. When you do this, a percentage commission will be credited to the affiliate’s account. You will probably run some kind of month end in which the value of total commissions for each affiliate is calculated and then paid over.
Simple!
Want an example?
Well, anywhere you see a link to iDevAffiliate on this page – hover over it and examine the link code itself. It is actually an affiliate link. That’s right – if you click it and subsequently purchase iDevAffiliate – we’ll be credited a small commission (15%), as this website has signed up as an iDevAffiliate affiliate (try saying that after a pint or two).
Why did we sign up as an iDevAffiliate affiliate?
Well, our software Course Merchant supports iDevAffiliate, as well as other affiliate tools. You can use iDevAffiliate to build and promote a large and sophisticated distributed sales channel to sell your e-learning Moodle courses – just as described above. Course Merchant also has its own in-built affiliate capability, not quite as sophisticated as iDevAffiliate perhaps, but still pretty effective. Info on Course Merchant’s own affiliate system is here >>>
SEO is Dead! Long Live SEO!
SEO is Dead!
I would like to put forward the argument that prioritising on achieving rank 1 on Google is a dangerous way to approach web marketing and a possible recipe for disaster. Over reliance on Google is dangerous and is not conducive to the long-term health and well being of your business.
Long Live SEO!
I would like to put forward the view that seriously embedding your website into the websites of others is the only long-term and sure way of achieving reliable traffic levels that will continue to grow over time. Admittedly, this approach will gain you Google page rank and the satisfactory side-effect of an enhanced Google listing. However, the prime purpose of this approach is to gain you reliable ongoing traffic from partner websites – regardless of your level of success in Google, Bing, Yahoo or any other search engine or directory system.
Wondering why?
You have no control over your listing in Google. It’s as simple as that. Maybe one day you’ll get barred because of over zealous actions of an SEO operator? Maybe the keyword you’ve been using turns out to be trademarked? Maybe Google change their algorithm in a way that negatively impacts your listing? Who knows? The fact is, you simply have no control. For an extreme example, check out http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/rich-tehrani/google/google-vs-kinderstartcom.html
Building Partnerships
I’m wanting to build partnerships. Real, sensible, business-motivated partnerships. My website working with yours. Your sales channel helping me. My sales channel helping you. I won’t put Google first. I will put my partnerships first. They will send me traffic – even if Google stops. Of course, my partnerships will build my page rank, which will improve my Google listing – but that’s secondary. I am taking a business minded, level-headed, commonsense approach – and you know what? Google loves it! Now that’s SEO!
What Partnerships?
Over the coming weeks and months we’ll add some info here on the kinds of partnerships we could build. From an ecommerce point of view, the most natural and sensible partnership to build is an affiliate network, and so we’ll start with that one.
Nothing New Under the Sun!!!
I recently met an old friend of mine in a wi-fi enabled coffee bar for a chat about his proposed new business venture. He is not particularly IT savvy and wanted some advice on his website.
To cut a long story short – he basically wants to start a blog detailing some of his experiences in a particular industry (he knows a lot). His idea is to build traffic and then try to monetize the site – paid links, book sales, adverts, workshops – you name it.
He had the whole thing worked out – even down to the domain name he wanted.
So, I opened my laptop, did a domain name check and, lo and behold – someone had already registered the name. Not only that, they were also doing more or less the same as he planned.
He was gutted.
I, on the other hand, was quite pleased!
No, I’m not a secret sociopath…
I told him it was merely validation that his idea was a good one. I’d have been more worried if there was no-one else doing what he planned. OK – so he needs another name – but that’s no big deal.
The fact is – there is nothing new under the sun. Simple as that. The lesson for him was quite clear – do the same thing, but do it bigger, better, smaller, cheaper, etc. Differentiate your offering somehow – but don’t expect to invent something completely new, it ain’t gonna happen…
Siftables – Coolest educational technology ever seen!
If you do nothing else today – watch the video at http://siftables.com/.
Update – website address change – http://sifteo.com/ (still looking amazing though).
It’ll be the most rewarding 7 minutes you’ll spend today. Honest!