| What's the Goal here - answers for Mark Oehlert |
|
Mark Oehlert recently found iLearnium and has some very good questions that I will try to answer. Brief History: At the end of 2005 I left an elearning consulting company where I was the Director of Media Solutions. I quickly began absorbing all things Web 2.0. as well as Open Source web apps. In an effort to leverage and demonstrate my competency with many of these technologies, I created iLearnium. The vision for iLearnium arose from my need to organize all of the various pieces of the elearning puzzle, thus the elearning bloggers directory and the review and rating sections. As Social Networking became more widely adopted, I added that component along with forums. So, from a personal level the goal was to demonstrate competency. As the only person behind the scenes with no current plan for revenue generation, it is a part-time labor of love. I really just wanted to see what happened if I built a platform and connected all of the pieces to form an elearning community and put it out there. The old adage, "Build it and they will come" just isn't true for the web anymore, if it ever was and maybe even less so for the elearning industry. My web server logs and Google Analytics do show I am getting visitors from all over the world largely from the US, Europe, & Hong Kong. The majority of which are reading and linking to elearning bloggers. However, community participation is non-existent. The reason for that may largely be in part to the fact that I haven't answered your question, "What is the motivation for participation?" Maybe if I built a revenue model that distributed a percentage of the profit to the most active participants? I don't really know what the answer is at this time. I am certainly open to any suggestions anyone may have. Here are some answers for some things: Why visit / join /participate at iLearnium? It's free! Information Overload - Centralized location for reading and linking to the various blog posts from thought leaders within elearning as well as news and technology sources. Product Reviews - Centralized location for reviews and ratings of tools related to elearning. Networking - Ability to browse and meet people in the members directory. Community - Ability to post questions, thoughts, insights, rants, or whatever else related to elearning in the forums. ps. Mark, most people won't be using Yahoo Pipes. It's a tech tool for tech geeks ;) |
