CiviTeacher.com has just arrived!
Many of you know me as Stoob or just as the guy with big hair making wisecracks at CiviCon. I'm also a guy with years of experience teaching adults in a classroom before I trasitioned into "the web". I've done audio engineering, video production and have now worked as an independent CiviCRM consultant and trainer specializing in small nonprofit clients for nearly six years. During interactions with dozens of organizations in this time I've come to realize that, although CiviCRM is awesome, it is not a solution. CiviCRM is a tool. Capable people who understand how to use tools are the solution. These factors have recently converged and put me in a unique position to offer something that adds value to our entire community. I'm proud and excited to announce CiviTeacher.com!
CiviTeacher organizes clear and concise videos into a portable and searchable CiviCRM learning library. While there are many training options, CiviTeacher aims to be an effective andcost-effective solution for visual, kinesthetic and auditory learners. These screencasts are not marketing videos, simplistic "click here" instructions, nor hours-long recycled recordings of live training. The CiviTeacher video library shows how to do real stuff in CiviCRM. I also offer viewers my knowledge and experience along the way: tips, tricks and best practices it would normally take years to acquire.
Other open source projects have similar subscription-model tutorial services like BuildAModule.com and Drupalize.me that boast over 2000 subscribers. They're very slick and charge a pretty penny but I understand our community is different. Not only is CiviCRM's user base about 1% the size of Drupal's, but our budget-conscious nonprofit audience needs direct instruction on a huge variety of occasional, easily-forgotten tasks. I am a perfectionist engineer. However, I realize that placing priorities on fancy production and overly-polished scripts above breadth & depth of quality content both increases cost and decreases speed of delivery. With these factors in mind, I went to work and built CiviTeacher during the last few weeks. I'm adding new videos weekly.
As I'm just getting started, CiviTeacher now has introductory subscription pricing. A monthly or yearly plan gains unlimited access to all the videos in the libarary. My goal is to add at leastone new video a week through the end of this year. If you know me you then you know I don't mess around. Ultimately I envision a library exceeding 100 videos, spanning a variety of topics and experience levels. In case you were wondering, I built CiviTeacher with CiviCRM, among other things like Drupal and Vimeo.
I looking forward to helping the community learn with CiviTeacher.