Most of you know that it's just Bill Wheaton and me (Tara Coulson) that make up the Education Services department at Fellowship Tech. Though we are small, we like to think we're big - at least most of the time. The Bible is full of stories of small people doing giant things and its pages are always an inspiration for us when we're thinking about upcoming projects.
What does this have to do with learning Fellowship One? We have been quiet for awhile because we have been working on a huge project that has been under wraps for most of last year and into this one. As many of you know, we have a free video library available on the Education tab of the Experience site. While educational, these videos were not very user-friendly for a variety of reasons including the frustrating proprietary video player provided by our vendor.
We have known we needed to have videos for about three years. Marie Armitage, a delivery manager, and I dreamed of providing this service for at least a year before we were able to move on it. As a stopgap measure, when Bill joined FT eUniversity, he and I chose to record the videos in our desktop sharing software during live classes. These recordings were cool if you were part of the class, but for those of you that weren't, listening to the extraneous stuff that goes along with hosting live training was not ideal.
The “huge project” we undertook was to dismantle all 24 hours of our existing video library and transform it into tiny bite sized Flash videos. We have affectionately been calling this project “chunking” since early 2007.
What does this do for you? For one, Adobe’s Flash player is more than likely already installed on your computer. Whoo hoo! No more crazy problems installing the player. But that’s not all; we chose to create these videos in small segments to allow you to quickly locate and listen to information you need at the time you need it.
When are they coming? Soon! We have found a place to host these videos and are in the process of final production and organization. We are praying for an end of April release. Over the next few weeks, Bill and I will be sharing a series of blogs on how we created, produced, and organized the videos for your enjoyment.
As always, please feel free to comment here or send us an email at education@fellowshiptech.com with your comments or suggestions. We love to hear feedback.
See you at Dynamic Church 08!
Tara Coulson
Learning Specialist
Education Services