livetutor247 site

Monday, July 14, 2008

Our online tutor center site, http://www.livetutor247.com, consist of:
index.htm - targeting the public for perspective students.
opportunities.htm - public page for the perspective tutors.
courses.htm - public page for all perspectives.
schedule.htm - public page for available scheduled (group or individual) classes
user.htm - secured page for registered user which contains profile, classes, and reports.
tutor.htm - secured page for contract tutors which contains profile, classes, and reports.

Index.htm
In essence, we do not need a lot of verbage to explain what we do. We should use lots of clear samples of what we do, such as archived or live audio/video clips. We shall use the tutor star as the base frame.

Opportunities.htm
We are to ask perspective tutor to tell us what course they would like to teach, or even to construct. The applicant can select their tutoring course from our courses.htm page or approved page, similar to learnoutloud.

The applicant needs to
1. to choose, and to submit a syllabus for a particualr subject.
2. to be tested on familiarity and ability to handle the tutoring of that subject.
3. to have a qualified syllabus and course material

Courses.htm
We offer (publish) our courses based on the availability of qualified contract tutors on this page. The course material pages can contain information like http://www.learnoutloud.com/Catalog/Languages, but organized in our own course numbers.

Schedule.htm
This page is made of javascript for (public and registered) user to navigate through all class schedules. The user may search for desired class by tutor, course, availability, and time.

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Roadmap
Here is what I have come up so far, (after going through several iterations of likely scenarios)
Our tutoring center might go through the following four stages:

stage 1 - A small direct retailer that does online language tutoring
stage 2 - An online tutoring center for many (a lot of) subjects
stage 3 - an OEM service provider to other Learning center
and finally
stage 4 - An online exchange for those who can and want to help and who need to be helped.

Regardless of which stage we can reach, there are lots of money to be made.

Stage 1
Most of the teaching material that we have secured are Pimsleur Learning.
Our main page are to re-post and fold those Pimsleur materials as if we are (but we will be) one of the Pimsleur authorized dealer. The advantages of (Pimsleur) learning system for those pages can be found from many of the pimsleur's other dealers. Those interested can buy the pimsleur audio books from us or elsewhere. But most importantly, sign up our tutoring session. Simply google on pimsleur will result tons of dealers.


Stage 2
At this stage we focus on building up great tutoring staff. We are going to establish the pay by ranking system. We are also are going to contact the students for feedbacks. We will have a rating system to make sure the tutor's pay reflects the student's feedback.

Stage 3
After we build up sufficient tutor staff, we have the learning centers to resell our tutoring specific, partial, or general tutoring services. Here are our value to our learning center partners:
a) the staff managment - We recruit, and manage our tutor staff, we make sure a tutor will be there for each and every session; if a tutor miss or late for the seesion for 3 times without a prior confirmed notice, this tutor are to be terminated.
b) white labeling - We can also support the anonymous reselling.
c) time slot/zone coverage - Our 247 operation covers all time zones, and our large tutor team size covers all timeslots.
d) subject/language coverage
e) session management - We facilitate and administer all sessions with great professional courtesey, such as email/sms reminders, and post reports.

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Media Presentation
what page needs to be developed depending on which stage we are in.
we can have like a video show/ promoting the site like on oracle. I have left the detail to you, such as video, spry widgets or apturized page, or the actor narrate on top of a page, by onsitevideos. The bottom line is that our solution can save time and money.

Media Storage
The (podcast) audio clips are to move to diinoweb. First we are going to use podcast diinoweb.com across the board to all our biz sites: Livetutor, Oracle, Inkjet, ... etc.

Organizing the Page Contents
To us, most of the spry widgets are great information folding mechanism. Depending on how much information we have to present, the accordion-ds holds more information than the sliding panel.

We could utilize these widgets on different pages. It might not be a good idea to put tutors on accordion. I think most people would prefer to use traditional index searching on class/course/tutor, and for different language programs,.

The slide panel is using background image instead of image on the panel. The slide panel is having a fix layout
Because the spry show panel command has a bug to re-layout images in the pane..... it will reset the cordinates and recalculate each time. In the process, the image is everywhere. So the tutorial that I took the reference design, bypass that problem by setting the image on the background

How to placing Content inside the Sliding Panel Pane
Sample page is on this site, and its template design is a very good layout, I can visualize those pages after added the widgets, and apturize page. The sliding panel widget does not work the same as the accordion.

Images
The images are located inside the images folders:
\images where the thumb images are stored.
\images\details where the images inside the pane are stored.

Use Firebug
Please use firebug to locate and exam the element that you like to change.
On firebug, Click on "Inspect", then "element", then "HTML",
then go up to the browser's (upper) view pane, and click on the element to be exam,
the fire bug will highlight the selected element's html code.

Do not Change/Touch the Layout
The sliding panel pane layout uses a split frame design: (background) image on the left, and text on the right. Limit the modification to simple replacement of the image, text, and bg color, so long we do not change its layout and keep the same design.

Background Color
index-1.html (line 33) #main #thumbs background: #4F310D
index-1.html (line 43) #main #panelContainer background: #452B0D
index-1.html (line 55) #main #panel0 background:#A8BAAA

Textual Content
All textual descriptions are inside the widget are located on the index-1.html
When navigate on sample page, those thumb image did not have the hover effect.
You are welcome to add the mouse over (hover) effect.
Object in Motion Image
How to make the image in transit? First reduce the image size save it and increase the size again!
when the image is blown up from a low resolution image, it became blur. This blur effect enhances the motion effect.

Mechanisms to be use for different types of info
On livetutor247 information such as languages, program, syllabus, our advantages, ...etc that all probably can take advantage of the widget panes
Having the tutor and course be shown on indexed search page make sense. The reason is that the tutor and course information are dynamically and frequently add, delete, and modified. Its size (volumn) can fluctuate (swing) rapidly.

The following information makes more sense to be grouped into one or many widget panes:
languages, programs, syllabus, advantages, competitor analysis, testimonials,

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Business Tactics
Sourcing from other Learning Center
Joint program with tour operator, exchange student
Free basic public (broadcast) lessons
Create Podcast syndication
Flat fee A La Cart
Automatic distribution of class note
Syllabus - predefined lessons
test ad
Automate TutorStar operation via ERD
Certification/referral
Reselling course material, such as Pimsleur

======To Dos before going live=========
1. local classified ad to recruit/quality tutor
2. contract tutor agreement
3. sign up tutor to upload their profile page.
4. drive the traffic to the website
5. sign up the class
6. admin to manage the individual/group lesson and generate reports
7. CRE rating/customer feedback
8. CRE search data
9. CRE form
a. CRE secured sign up/in
b. CRE payment
c. CRE transaction/record/notice
d. Two way live instruction - live.yahoo (2 or more cameras), skype audio, Mikogo