it's learning is great!
it's learning is great. It's a terrific product, it's a good service and it's a great place to work. Maybe I'm not a very objective or credible as a source for this information having been one of the managers of this company for the past 4,5 years. Being one of the people with the initial idea to the product back when I was a student might also have clouded my vision. Perhaps there are even days when I don't feel this is true myself. (It doesn't happen very often, but we sometimes have days like this or this)
But that's not really my point. What I am trying to achieve is to counter-balance something that has been bugging me for quite some time. If you search for us using Google, one of the first results points to a web-site that compares our product/company with manure.
If you're a potential customer or just looking for some info on us, please read this:
- The mentioned web-page is, in my opinion, about as full of it as it claims it's learning to be. Please get a demo of our product before you make up your own mind.
- Last week we had more than 250.000 unique users logged in to it's learning one or more times - a proof that a lot of people find the software quite useful.
- Not only do we have the dominant market share in primary and secondary education here in Norway, we are also the supplier of virtual learning environments to some of the biggest universities in Scandinavia (To mention a few: University of Copenhagen, University og Malmö and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology).
- We're a company still largely owned by the former students that originally founded the company back in 1999 and our financial situation is very robust.
- We're qualified for the BECTA Learning Platform Services Agreement in the UK after a very througout tender process that looked at a lot of different sides of our product and services.
- Comment this post. Let us know a little bit about who you are and what you think about or product, services or company. (I do moderate my comments because of random spam problems - but I will of course let critical remarks pass!)
- If you find this post interesting and feel slightly sympatetic please link to it or pass it on to others. This way mabye we can actually get this article up on Google's ranking to counter-balance some of the bad karma from the prevously mentioned post.
- If you do not think we deserve to be known to the world as escrements, please do not link to any web-site describing us in this manner, it will only increase its google ranking.
Thank you, yours sincerely,
John Arthur
13 comments:
I'm commenting this one JAB, and recomending all readers interested in reading aboute it's learning til visit: http://nilsh.blogspot.com or the company homepage http://www.itsolutions.no
Du har fått en link fra kjempekjekt.com. Blir spennende å følge med på Google-ratingen :)
My review on Gamespot.com got banned because of Trolling. Never heard of that one though :)
But I agree with your blog. Sometimes freedom of speech can go too far...
Thanks for the comments so far, keep them coming...
Just to make one point clear; I'm not trying to surpress or limit anybody's right to have opinions on our product or organisation. I am just exercising my own right to disagree and hopefully bring some balance to the universe known to google...
I understand your frustration JAB but you can't take the comments of this one user seriously. He rages about minor and untrue things we know better! I guess regular visitors of Google can take an more objective view and do some research!
I have talked with many teachers and students who use it's learning on a daily basis and they are really happy with it's learning to help them in the educational proces.
As far as I have seen it is the best solution in the market. But of course you need to take comments and critics seriously to keep on making the best product! Good luck!
Har lenket til deg fra http://web.mac.com/eaadland/iWeb/Websted/Eriks%20blogg/Eriks%20blogg.html
mvh
Erik
I don't know who schools around the world should really ask in terms of LMS (Learning Management System), when trying to find a good one.
But I may be a more credible source than you, because I actually have to live with this "It's Learning" crap. I know you made it, but something must be wrong if you think it is great.
I am not the only one on my school who doesn't like it, and I'm not the only one on the internet. There are two links below.
site 1
site 2
BTW, your login count does not prove that people think ITSL is great. People are forced to use it. Maybe you should make a survey, to see if people really like it.
Janus - mabye if you take the time to read the post over again you will indeed see that I'm not just saying that "it's great". Making good software is a rewarding and interesting job but it is also hard work and resource demanding. Sometimes we do not have the resources needed or perhaps even the skills to get it perfect.
It is true that numbers alone doesn't necessarily makes us great. But I hardly believe that we would have grown to be such a large service for educational institutions if it was crap.
"I hardly believe that we would have grown to be such a large service for educational institutions if it was crap."Universities don't pay for their students' time, and in Norway aren't very concerned with what their students think (...yet! This will change.).
And do you have any real competitors out there? I have been a student at NTNU for some years now, and convincing my projects groups to shift from It's Learning's inbuilt project software to Google Groups and Google Docs was veery easy. One of my last group members said he was shocked by how much time we saved by not going with It's Learning.
I suspect that you'll lose a lot of customers as soon as any real competition shows up on the rest of the package. Frankly, I would pay money to not have to use It's Learning. That's how bad I think it is. And if you really are so confident that users actually like your software, you shoul build in some really short polls and promise to make the results public no matter how they turn out (which, you of course won't do... I mean, that would be stupid :)
I have a relatively non-existing relationship with It's Learning, but from what I've read online the last week or so, regarding the lack of a good UI, the weird quirks, and the arrogance some of It's Learning's employees express towards users when faced with questions as to how good the platform really is, my 2 cents worth of opinions goes to vote it "not nearly good enough".
With users today getting more and more demanding, and getting used to simple, easy-to-use, instant-gratification services like Google, Facebook, Twitter and the like, It's Learning should definitely take heed and check with the actual users what they want, what they need, and also cater to the different user groups' needs - teachers, kids, college students - they all got different views as to what they want and need, and when they need it.
Why isn't It's Learning compromised of user configurable modules? Take a look at www.netvibes.com for instance - loads and loads of information, all in easily configurable "boxes", which can be dragged around the screen, removed, minimised etc.
A static page, which presents information in a locked setting, without configuration, and which doesn't have a proper search engine implemented (which search everything, and then presents a decent guess as to the importance of the different search hits) etc. is NOT a good product.
It's Learning might be used at several (if not most?) of the schools in Norway. And on some UNIs too. That doesn't mean it's good. It just means it's less crap than the other alternatives. Which isn't really good enough, guys.
Hi and thanks for your comments. I guess certain incidents in the blogosphere have spurned some interest in this old blog post. Although I think the discussion is partially born out misconceptions about our company and product, it also brings back some fond memories; The student paper that preceded it's learning was indeed born out of frustration with the lack of use in at our university (Høgskolen i Bergen) utilised the technology that was readily available.
As for the comment from Nik about competition I am sure you will not take my word for it but there are indeed a range of competitors out there. In Norway a tender in higher education will typically involve 3-5 suppliers, and in the UK there are 9 suppliers qualified by the British government to supply Virtual Learning Environments toUK schools. Indeed, competition has been so fierce that a typical higher education institution will pay the equivalent to a couple of pints a year for a student license.
Although PoPSiCLe's comment makes me uncertain if he has used our product or takes his/her opinion of the product the blogosphere, there are a few points here that are important and I can offer my two cents on. It's learning is not a generic project tools or a generic collaboration tool – it is a learning platform where management of the learning process and improving learning outcome is at the core of our offering. As an example I can mention our blogging tool. As a generic blogging tool it is no match for what Google or SixApart, but if used in an integrated pedagogical approach you can do stuff not easily achieved with a generic tool.
Having said that, there is no doubt that the future of learning platforms depends on the ability to integrate with some of the superior but generic web 2.0 tools that we all have become so dependent of over the last few years. Monolithic software development is a thing of the past, and as a part of this we have just launched an API that we hope will make it easier to integrate it's learning with 3rd party applications (http://developer.itslearning.com/).
Although my blog hasn’t been updated much recently I’ll do my best to answer questions or comments from others that find themselves on this page. (Skriv gjerne på norsk)
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