ruzuku

January Changes to Ruzuku

rachellabs — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:56:00 -0500

This January Ruzuku got a new team member: me! I’m Rachel Nabors, the new front-end developer. A front-end developer wrangles all the HTML, CSS and JavaScript on a site so that visitors have a faster, more consistent experience across all your devices and browsers. I’ll be posting from time to time about what we developers are doing to make Ruzuku better for you.

Performance updates
This week Ruzuku experienced more activity than ever before! Unfortunately, all that hustle and bustle exposed some bottlenecks in our code’s performance. We worked super hard all week to push some major performance updates. We’re not done yet, but already you should notice speedier response times. We’ll keep you posted as we roll out new improvements on that front over next few weeks.

Audio on the iPad
Ruzuku has been using Flash players to deliver video and audio content to its users since we launched, back when iPads were but a twinkling in Apple’s eye. But Flash isn’t supported on iPads, and we know many people are taking Ruzuku courses on them. This week I switched us over to an HTML5 audio player. This means that whether you’re using an iPad or Internet Explorer, you can listen to audio right on the page. Very soon we’ll be extending this functionality to video. (In the mean time, don’t forget that all video files are available to download and play in your iPad’s native video player.)

Course Management Menu
For guides, we’ve consolidated the course management options, like renaming and copying a course, into your course management dropdown menu. This menu is available on your course pages and next to each course on your course list page.

And here it is on the discussion list:

Discussion changes
Now when students want to start a discussion on an activity, they have the option to view everyone else’s responses before posting their own.

Additionally, we’ve made a few changes to the discussion box to make the posting options more transparent.

We have more improvements coming soon. Stay tuned!

We're giving away 5 copies of Design for How People Learn

ournoisyhearts — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:26:00 -0500

We know how much work goes into creating a great course. But for the course to really be as meaningful as it can be, you have to connect with your students in a meaningful way. And that’s why we love Julie Dirksen’s book Design for How People Learn. It’s an amazing exploration of how you actually create courses for learning.

We love it so much, we’re giving away 5 copies.

Entering to win is as simple as following us on Twitter before tomorrow. For those counting, that’s Tuesday, January 31 at 11:59PM EST.

We’ll announce the winners on Wednesday.

Good luck!

And don’t forget to tell your friends about this. You win a copy, they win a copy. It’s all good!

P.S. If you’re following us on Twitter, you’re already entered into the contest — why not share this with a friend? Just use the tweet written below:

Did you hear @ruzuku is giving away 5 copies of Design for How People Learn? Follow them and you could win on Wednesday too!

Teach Now has come to ruzuku!

ournoisyhearts — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 11:30:33 -0500

Something very cool has happened in the last few weeks — the program Teach Now is now on ruzuku! As their tagline says, this course is designed for participants to “inspire, renew, and give courage” to the their teaching.

Curious as to why Teach Now decided to pick up and move to ruzuku? Creator Jen Louden explains:

“The first thing is it feels like a friendlier space than WordPress - the interface and the ability to check things off delights me. I love that we can chat in each module; the Facebook page we used last time got so disorganized. I love that Ruzuku offers live tech support — for some people that means all the difference between using the course or not. I love how easy it is to use, intuitive and again friendly.”

We’re thrilled about Teach Now’s new presence on ruzuku and are excited to get the word out!

The Reviews Keep Comin'

ournoisyhearts — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 17:01:03 -0500

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: we love getting user feedback! That’s why we were so excited to see consultant and blogger Meredith Eisenberg write a review for ruzuku. Not only does Meredith explain how she set up her course, she took it to the next level and made a video documenting the process! Her favorite part of ruzuku? “The thing I really like about Ruzuku is that it forces you to structure the course in a way that people can learn from it.”

We hope you’ll find Meredith’s review of ruzuku very helpful, so check it out at her blog!

We Have a WINNER!

ournoisyhearts — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 12:00:48 -0500

We had such a great time running our Teaching Sells + ruzuku Giveaway, and we hope you had fun too! It was so much fun that we actually decided to pick TWO winners.

The winner of six free months of ruzuku is…

DEB ROBSON!

Our grand prize winner, who gets a free Teaching Sells account + a free year of ruzuku is…

THERESA ELAINE!

Congratulations to our winners and a big THANK YOU to everyone who entered.

- the ruzuku team

Only ONE Day Left to Win!

ournoisyhearts — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:21:00 -0500

Just a reminder… our Teaching Sells + ruzuku Giveaway is ending TOMORROW (12/14) at 11:59PM EST.

But don’t worry — there are still plenty of ways to enter before the deadline!

Have you joined our Giveaway Challenge Course? Or signed up for tomorrow’s webinar?

You can also Tweet us, write a review of ruzuku on your blog, or send us a few referrals!

We’ll be announcing the winner on Friday, so make sure you stay tuned to find out if you’re our lucky one.

Webinar Announcement - Win Your Way into Teaching Sells + ruzuku

ournoisyhearts — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 14:50:00 -0500

Our first week of the Teaching Sells + ruzuku contest has been a blast! Stay tuned all week for even more chances to win this amazing $2,500 value…

As promised, we’ll be having three ruzuku walk-through webinars you can attend, worth two entries. You’ll see the sign up links below. All you have to do is click the link, register for the webinar, and you’ll receive an email with the info to join!

Tuesday December 6, 9PM EST

Friday December 9, 12:30PM EST

Wednesday December 14, 3PM EST

We hope to see you there!

Ruzuku + Teaching Sells = Full of Win

ournoisyhearts — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 16:16:00 -0500

We’re giving away a FREE account to Teaching Sells by Copyblogger worth $1,997 + one year of Ruzuku worth $468.

Are you struggling with ideas for your courses? Need to regain momentum in your online business? Ruzuku can help. And so can Teaching Sells, which is why we’re giving away access to both!

Check out Teaching Sells’ 20-step Roadmap for an overview of what’s included in this authoritative, comprehensive program. You’ll also get access to the Teaching Sells forums, where you can chat, trade stories, and make connections with other TS participants. And did we mention it normally costs $1,997 to get into Teaching Sells?

But you won’t have to pay a penny if you win our contest! Not to mention that Teaching Sells is officially closed for registration, which means this just might be the last ticket into the program

AND THAT’S NOT ALL. In addition to access to Teaching Sells, we’re also giving our lucky winner one year free access to ruzuku so they can apply everything they learn in Teaching Sells to quickly and easily get their own learning community up and running.

So, how can you win your way into Teaching Sells and Ruzuku? Several ways, actually. Each is worth a different number of entries; the more entries you have, the more likely it is you’ll be our randomly selected winner!

Ways to Enter

Not a paying customer yet? You can sign up for and complete the Teaching Sells Giveaway Challenge Course (worth five entries)
Non-ruzuku customers can also attend a special webinar walk through of ruzuku on Tuesday 12/6 @ 9:00 EST, Friday 12/9 @ 12:30 EST, or Wednesday 12/14 @ 3:00 EST (worth two entries)
Write a review of ruzuku on your blog (worth five entries)
Send us referrals! Refer people you know who might be interested in ruzuku by completing this form (each referral is worth one entry)
Promote this contest on Twitter, Facebook, your blog or your mailing list (each is worth one entry — be sure to email us links so we can count your entries!)

This contest starts right NOW and closes 11:59 PM Eastern Standard Time on Wednesday December 14. We’ll then tally the points and pick a winner!

The lucky winner will be announced Friday December 16.

Good luck! And if you have any questions, feel free to email us at teachingsells@ruzuku.com!

P.S. Copyblogger Media in no way endorses ruzuku. We just like the content in Teaching Sells so much that we want to share it with our fans!

Ruzuku's Been Reviewed!

ournoisyhearts — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 15:42:13 -0500

As ruzuku continues to grow, we appreciate any and all feedback our users and customers can give us. It’s why we’re so excited to see that blogger Melani Ward of Good Fun Teaching recently wrote an independent review of ruzuku. In the article, she explains the process of signing up, completing our intro course ruzuku 101, how she set up her first ruzuku course quickly and easily, as well as her favorite features. She explains, “My courses flow better, the learners get more out of them and the interactive piece allows me to constantly retool and improve on the fly.”

Check out all the things Melani has to say about ruzuku at her blog.

What’s the buzz about On Demand?

ournoisyhearts — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 15:19:43 -0400

You may have heard a little bit about our new On Demand courses. Now that ruzuku’s On Demand feature has gone live, we want to tell you a little bit more about it and all the benefits On Demand can provide.

Our old model, which only allowed for Scheduled courses, meant a course had a fixed start and end date. Participants who missed registration were therefore left out and had to wait for the course to be offered again to sign up.

Scheduled courses are a great option, particularly if you are looking for your students to go through the experience of your material together as a group. While we still provide the Scheduled courses option, ruzuku now allows for the added flexibility of On Demand courses as well.

As a Guide, you choose a date to publish your course, and participants can sign up any time after that date. This allows people to register for your course at any time as long as registration is open — no one gets left out, and Steps and Activities will be paced as normal.

To set your course as On Demand, simply go to the Schedule & Price page under Manage Course, select the ‘On Demand’ scheduling option, and choose what date you’d like your course to become available.

Several of our Guides are already taking advantage of the On Demand feature. Marlene Hielema, our resident Image Maven, is hosting a course on the core fundamentals of basic photography — while it lasts for four weeks and four days, you can sign up and begin at any time without missing a beat.

Whether Scheduled or On Demand courses are your style is up for you to decide. We hope both options better facilitate the online learning experience for your participants.

Ruzuku powers Marlene's photography business

ournoisyhearts — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 17:46:00 -0400

Marlene Hielema is our resident Image Maven. As a photographer and teacher, Marlene shares her knowledge of photography and digital editing with others through her blog as well as her online courses on ruzuku. In this video, Marlene explains how and why she uses ruzuku for her business and gives advice to anyone thinking about starting a course on ruzuku.

Ruzuku Powers Marlene’s Photography Business from Ruzuku on Vimeo.

Curious to learn more? Sign up for one of Marlene’s courses!

Photography beginners will enjoy her Six Simple Steps to Shoot & Edit Camera Raw Files. Sign up here!

To learn how to better utilize photography in YOUR course, join Marlene for our FREE Better Content: Photography Course. Sign up here!

Our homepage got a makeover!

ournoisyhearts — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 16:29:44 -0400

Have you noticed our new homepage yet? We’ve made a few adjustments we think you’ll like. So, what’s new, you ask?

A more detailed tour shows you exactly how ruzuku looks and works. We know you’re curious to learn as much about ruzuku as possible. Our new tour has 22 screenshots that show you exactly how ruzuku works and how it can help you build your own online course and learning community.

Ruzuku 101 is On Demand. We created our “Ruzuku 101” course to help introduce you to the basics of creating your very own online course or learning community. “Ruzuku 101” is now available on demand – that means you can start it at any time! Try out all of the features we have to offer and see what you can do with ruzuku! When you sign up for the course, you’ll automatically get a free 14-day trial of ruzuku, so you can try out our course creation tools for yourself.

We hope these improvements help you learn more about ruzuku and how to make ruzuku work best for you!

Get to know ruzuku!

ournoisyhearts — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 13:28:16 -0400

Interested in learning more about ruzuku? Join us for a webinar!
Thursday, September 1 at 3:00 PM EDT. Register now!

We’ll be going over the basics of course creation, scheduling and pricing, and some handy tools you can use to make your course as engaging as possible. It’s also a chance for you to ask questions and chat with the ruzuku team.

If you missed our last webinar, or if you’re new to ruzuku, this demo is a great introduction to ruzuku and how we make it easy to help you create online courses and learning communities.

Register Now:

https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/875139806

Ruzuku powers Mary Bartnikowski's photography

ournoisyhearts — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 18:44:11 -0400

For over twenty-five years, Mary Bartnikowski has been a professional photographer and traveler. Now, she’s looking for a way to share all of the knowledge she has gained with the world, and she’s chosen ruzuku to do it! In this video, Mary shares how creating her ruzuku course will help her reach more people than traditional means, such as one-on-one lessons.

Ruzuku Powers Mary’s Photography from Ruzuku on Vimeo.

If you’d like to learn more about Mary, visit her website bartnikowski.com and be sure to look for her ruzuku course coming soon!

Ruzuku vs. Auto-responders

ournoisyhearts — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 16:43:00 -0400

Auto-responders such as AWeber and MailChimp can be a great way to first make contact with a customer, stay in touch over time and keep them informed about what’s happening in your company. These sites offer attractive features:

They make building trust and confidence between the customer and your brand easy
Emails can be customized for each recipient
You can include copy of your message plus any supplemental downloads
Scheduling auto-responders means you don’t even need to send the email yourself

This all sounds pretty great, right? So why not use an auto-responder to deliver a free e-course? If all you’re looking to do is provide regularly delivered content to your potential customers, then sure. But if you’re looking to build a community and encourage conversion, you should be using ruzuku.

Build Community

Ruzuku provides a destination where you can actually interact with your users. At the start of every step, your students will get an email from you outlining the activities for the step. So, not only are your customers getting regular reminders from you, but you’re also able to break down the content into more manageable chunks, so your potential customers don’t feel overwhelmed.

What’s more, ruzuku is designed around community interaction. Ruzuku discussions make it easy for people to talk about your lessons, ask questions and post additional resources. Not only can you provide a more hands-on experience for your potential customers (building a stronger relationship leads to higher conversion!), it also creates opportunity for your customers to help each other.

And just like auto-responders, you get to decide when content is available to participants and what attachments (video, audio, slideshows or documents for download) your students can access. But more than that, ruzuku also shows you how people are interacting with your content and with each other — something auto-responders can’t do.

Measuring Engagement

Auto-responders are great for reaching a large number of people. But what they don’t tell you is how people are interacting with your content. Someone could open up an auto-responder email, then delete it immediately, and programs like AWeber and MailChimp would still count these as “Opens” — leading you to inaccurately believe people are engaging with your material.

Ruzuku provides a Course Health page so you can see how participants are progressing through your course.

Health bars monitor when students complete an activity by checking it off. In addition to the content engagement, ruzuku also provides insight into your students interactions as measured by their Participation Score, which is a combination of Posts, Responses, and Comments. With all this rich information, you can easily see how engaged your customers are and make changes to content as necessary.

The Bottom Line

Auto-responders can be helpful in starting the relationship with your customers, but they fail to create a lasting connection with your students. With ruzuku, though, you get the opportunity to engage potential customers by building richer relationships that lead to higher conversions than simple auto-responders.

There’s no denying that we’re highly biased, which is why we encourage you to take ruzuku for a spin yourself. You’ll quickly see how Ruzuku trumps auto-responders for customer engagement. Sign up today and get a 30-day money back guarantee; if it’s not for you, we’ll refund your money. You can also sign up for Ruzuku 101 to take it for a spin yourself.

Ruzuku vs. Speaking Engagements and Workshops

ournoisyhearts — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 12:31:00 -0400

The power of speech

Professional speakers can offer a compelling, motivating message, and they do so for a living. Prepared talks are the mainstay of many conferences and have enjoyed a renaissance thanks to new formats like TED’s 20-minute talks.

Many professional speakers also combine speaking with consulting, particularly though in-house arrangements with corporations. For example, Merlin Mann built his reputation as a blogger and now offers talks and consults to companies that want to improve their productivity.

A variation of this business model is to offer workshops, which typically focus on smaller groups and include hands-on activities and close, personal interaction with the instructor. We’ve dabbled in this arena ourselves, by offering workshops on user experience design (“User Experience 101” and “Practical Usability Testing”).

Well-delivered talks and workshops can be powerful, engrossing learning experiences. They often get high ratings from participants and can earn thousands of dollars in revenue.

So what’s the problem?

First, there’s pricing. Because the speaker has to appear in person (often requiring travel), talks, conferences, and workshops often charge registration fees of hundreds or even thousands of dollars. That can be a major barrier to entry.

What’s more, attending a live event may inspire you for a day or give you some great new ideas. But this approach still doesn’t provide accountability or support for actually implementing the concepts once the event is over. A speaker might connect — powerfully — to 200 people in an auditorium for an hour, but that’s the last they’ll see of her.

Embrace and extend…

You can use ruzuku to complement and extend your speaking in several ways.

With our “UX 101” workshop, we created a “follow-up” course on ruzuku. Everyone who signed up for the workshop enrolled in the online course and received weekly summaries of key ideas from the workshop along with links to additional resources. Students could post questions and comments as they began to apply the ideas from the workshop into their own work.

Creating this kind of follow-up online activity can help you increase the value of your speaking engagements and workshops, allowing you to increase prices or enrollment.

Another approach is to create a distance-learning offer, based on your existing speaking or workshop content. You might have yourself recorded and then pull out audio or video clips to include on ruzuku. You could also consider offering scheduled webinars combined with resources and discussion on ruzuku. Angela Maiers has had success with this hybrid approach in her course on Digital Literacy.

Speaking engagements and workshops are a great way to initiate contact and generate ideas, but ultimately, they lack follow-through with your audience. By bringing the topics and discussions along to ruzuku, you can keep your conversation and content active for much longer, adding continued life and vibrancy to your brand.

Ruzuku vs. One-on-one Consulting or Coaching

torchesxpitchforks — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 22:26:00 -0400

Personal service works, but it never scales

One-on-one coaching is a great way for experts to connect with their clients, collaboratively develop strategies, and provide the accountability to implement those strategies. In the right context, coaching works. For example, in “Executive Coaching: It Works!”, published in Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, the authors write:

Outcomes of this empirical study demonstrated that executive coaching is an effective method of leadership development… Results indicated that executive change occurred in 5 areas: people management, relationships with managers, goal setting and prioritization, engagement and productivity, and dialogue and communication… The success of this coaching program also suggests that investment in well-designed and implemented programs can contribute to leadership development and the retention of talent.

Evidence also exists that shows life coaching can improve personal well-being and flourishing (see “The Evidence for Coaching”).

However, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Experienced executive coaches typically charge hundreds of dollars per hour. (Whenever a service has the word “executive” in it, you know you’re in trouble when it comes to pricing!) A company might pay $5K - $10K for a rising executive to coach over a period of time. That puts the service out of reach for the vast majority of people seeking to improve their professional skills (such as relationship-building, productivity, etc…).

Life coaching is generally less expensive but still not cheap. While the sessions can be quite helpful for clarifying goals and identifying my next steps, at around $100/hour they started to add up quickly.

Also, if you’re an independent expert who focuses primarily on personal coaching, you’ve already seen the other side of the challenge: you can’t scale your own expertise. That makes it impossible for you to earn additional revenue without booking more clients or charging higher rates.

From personal to online; from individual to group

Ruzuku can help you expand your offerings in two ways. First, it helps you easily share ideas (through articles and video), assessments, and activities with your clients in a secure, private online community. Second, it helps you facilitate group coaching and learning to complement your existing one-on-one services.

For example, Dr. Lisa Chu, a life coach who specializes in helping physicians, nurses and other care providers, created Self-Care for the Caring Professional, a ruzuku-based course for her audience. This course provides participants with core ideas about self-care that Lisa would introduce clients to in one-on-one sessions. She provides activities to apply the ideas, as well as encouragement and coaching as participants try them out.

Creating an online learning community of this type can make good business sense for both you and your clients. For example, suppose you create a five-week course on ruzuku and charge $199 for access. If you have ten clients sign up, that’s $2K in revenue. If you spend two hours per week facilitating the community, that’s 10 hours of “coaching time,” or about $200/hour. But because each individual client is only paying $199, you can reach a larger audience than you could previously. In addition, once you’ve created your structure and content on ruzuku, you can easily run a course many times.

At ruzuku, we promised to respect our customer’s time by providing an effective learning platform that allows experts, coaches and instructors to scale their expertise. We’re here to make good on that promise.

Ruzuku vs. Ebooks

torchesxpitchforks — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 17:18:00 -0400

The Value of Publishing

As we’ve mentioned in earlier posts, many independent experts scale their expertise by broadcasting information, and the most straightforward way to broadcast your message is through publishing a book or an ebook. It’s simple, and it can work — depending on what your goals are.

If your goal is to make a living from your writing, and you’ve got the ideas, name and connections to score a deal with a big-name publishing house, then what are you reading this blog for?! However, that’s a little out of reach for most folks.

If your goal is to use your book as a calling card, helping you present yourself as a respected expert in order to book speaking gigs and consulting engagements, then this seems like a more realistic goal for most independent experts.

Sometimes, ebooks can even be used as a great way to grow an audience for your courses. For example, Get Storied offers the “Believe Me” eBook for free, while building a business around the “New About Me” course, which is hosted on ruzuku.

Do books and ebooks work for readers?

Books and eBooks are inexpensive, typically costing $10 - $30. They can provide comprehensive information in an easily-understandable format, but how much impact do they really have on the reader’s behavior? In many cases, you read the book, you put it down (or close the PDF), and you don’t do anything differently. It is fundamentally difficult to implement and apply concepts from a book on your own without any support or structure.

In addition, these formats fail to take advantage of the Web’s ability to present multimedia and interactivity. Ruzuku, however, allows you can supplement text with audio, video, animations, and slide presentations. You can give your students surveys, assessments, and quizzes to complete through interactive forms.

Ruzuku also helps you create a social learning environment. While learning from a book can be isolating, learning on ruzuku takes place in the company of supportive peers, with professional guidance (that’s your job!). We believe that learning in a community is more motivating, fun, and effective than learning on your own.

Is Ruzuku for you?

torchesxpitchforks — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 13:07:25 -0400

We designed Ruzuku for passionate, independent experts. Does that sound like you? You’re probably a good fit for Ruzuku if…

You want to help people learn and grow

Is there something (anything!) that you love helping people learn about? Here are some topics that current Ruzuku customers are passionate about:

Photography
Reducing stress and improving quality of life
Education and digital literacy
Business analysis techniques
Shaping your personal story

You have a strong personal brand

You may already be helping people learn and grow by posting to your blog, selling your own ebook, or participating in forums and social media. Maybe you charge for your information, or maybe you don’t. Either way, what matters is the connection you make with your students and the joy you feel when you help someone move forward in their own understanding.

Like Marlene, “The Image Maven,” or Phil, “The Make It Great Guy,” you’ve worked long and hard to develop your identity and build awareness of what you offer. Now, Ruzuku can help you connect with your audience. Our goal is to get out of your way — to make Ruzuku simple and seamless, so your personal brand shines through. And that’s why your students pay you directly when they sign up a course — not us. In the coming months, you’ll see even more features that allow your personal brand to be front-and-center in every interaction your students have with Ruzuku.

You expect things to just work

Maybe you understand the technical side of the Internet and maybe you don’t. Either way, you want your online learning tool to be easy and pleasant to use for you and your students. We’ve launched Ruzuku and have gotten lots of positive feed back, but — like Lexus, but with less pretension — we’re never satisfied. We’re constantly working to improve the design and functionality of Ruzuku so it works better for you and your community.

If you want to learn more about Ruzuku, watch our introductory video. Or if you’d like a free 30-day trial of Ruzuku, drop us a note: freetrial@ruzuku.com .

Ruzuku powers Angela Maiers' education

ournoisyhearts — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 14:55:00 -0400

As an educational consultant, Angela Maiers has chosen ruzuku to help spread her message. Angela works with schools, organizations, and individuals to focus on using modern technology and social media to engage others and operate more efficiently.

In her first ruzuku course, “Digital Literacy and Global Collaboration,” Angela and her students examined how technology today has transformed the concept of traditional literacy.

In the video below:

Find out how ruzuku powered Angela’s first course.
Learn how Angela’s ruzuku experience went.
Hear direct feedback from two of her course’s students.

Ruzuku Powers Angela’s Education from Ruzuku on Vimeo.