http://www.azcentral.com/business/consumer/articles/2009/09/22/20090922teach.html – I don’t know if anyone has seen this, or if this was posted elsewhere, but FYI…CONGRATULATIONS eduFire crew! You guys are doing a great job!

Great! Congratulations Edufire!
Thanks Larry for letting us know!!

Woohoo!

and a huge thank you to every one of you for making eduFire what it is today.

woo hoo is right! :-)

Kewl! I just added that article to my favorites, under “colleges and schools”.
Tx, Marco!

Thanks for positing this Larry! Yeah eduFire!

Congrats to this great family called Edufire!;)

that is great actually, i did not know that the site has such capacity; 30,000 members, 5,000 teachers, 150 class a day, that is great. when i joined edufire more than a year ago, i never thought it would reach such a volume, but hey that is what success is all about, congratulation edufire and all of us, we deserve it.

That’s good. You know, a couple months back when I was researching, there were certain keword searches that made it sound like WIZIQ was online education — I imagine they invested quite a bit in SEO for that. I think the sites are generally better where the owners, CEOs and admininistrators are visible. At WIZIQ, last thing I knew, one of the privileges of paid teacher membership (as opposed to free) was the ability to enter your classroom before class started. I really don’t think that’s a good thing to have teachers paying for! If a site takes a cut for use of its platform — as opposed to a membership fee — they might have more invested in making it work.

Karen, WiZiQ is something different…. it isn’t a community like eduFire and it serves other purposes…. the yearly fees to use the platform are minimal and it has many more features than just allowing entering the classroom before class starts. It is what it is: a platform for professionals (like me and others) to use with their clients and keep their sessions/classes private (they aren’t published anywhere) and run their own businesses (among other things, billing the clients directly) independently – under their biz names.

Personally, it suits my needs just perfectly…. but I don’t make comparisons between there and here … because it’s simply different…. ;-) As I said, two sites… two different vocations/purposes… WiZiQ doesn’t provide us with students: we have our own… therefore it is probably not the right place to be for people who are looking for students… And, as a footnote, using the platform here isn’t free… and a percentage taken as a commission on teachers’ earnings doesn’t mean that owners of a site invest more effort… either way, these people are in business and it’s in their best interest to invest effort… :-)

That’s true — it’s a different service. I know there are many upgraded features with a paid membership (as there are at TeachStreet and other organizations); including the “enter the classroom before class” under the banner of upgraded benefits just does not seem personally to me like a good idea — that one raised my eyebrows a bit. I don’t honestly know if their search engine rankings are a SEO effort, or a lot of people have WIZIQ classrooms under the banner of their own website (I believe a person can add their WIZIQ classroom to their website as an external page; that may increase link popularity — i don’t know). I do know that when I was looking for online teaching platforms, certain key word searches turned up multiple WIZIQ listings on the first page of Google. Some of them were related to press-releases, and I believe that press releases are often an SEO effort.
There is a tutoring directory (not WIZIQ !) that has posted on Craiglist several times that, due to an increase in demand for tutoring in my geographical area, they need more tutors. That company charges a listing fee for even basic listings, and I have reason to doubt that an increase in demand for tutors is the reason they run those ads! But, again, that’s not WIZIQ (and I’m trying to not do any more naming of names.)
I don’t have anything against WIZIQ; I’d just like to see Edufire have a search engine ranking more on a par with what I think they are giving people.

Karen…. of course SEO is always a plus for any sites on the web…. and keywords are very important, so that they match what most likely people will enter in their searches….

Personally, I had only two requests that came through WiZiQ…. yet those two individuals were civil servants looking for help to prepare for their SLE tests and they had entered terms (in their searches) that I do systematically use in my blog posts and on my WiZiQ profile…. the latter appears on the page with all the other links to my business (blog and website). To me, it doesn’t really matter on which of those links people do click as long as they land in my backyard! ;-)

As for are there many people having classrooms there? I couldn’t tell, since many classes are kept private (although there is a separate cluster for public classes…. I admit I am not familiar with this other side) yet I guess these people bring traffic to the site since their own are linked to it…. But definitely, an SEO effort shouldn’t be neglected!

As I mentioned before, I don’t make comparisons because I basically rent a virtual classroom (just as I rent one in the real world) and I consider it merely as a tool. Therefore I don’t really know (and I am not interested either) what’s going on over there… I do run my business and all I am concerned with is the functionality of this tool and its user friendly aspect… and, of course, the tech support I do get (I have to say that this service is top notch)…

Hot topic going on exploring gud things:-)

Alright! We probably agree on as much as we disagree on. I believe there’s good SEO and bad SEO, good advertising and bad advertising. I do think that folks sometimes invest a lot of money in fooling both people and search engines about how good (or popular) something is. In a lot of cases, I think it ultimately fails. I know still another tutor directory (again, not WIZIQ) that has quite a number of ‘affiliates’, a lot of which seem to be merely alternative names for themselves. I actually don’t think they rank real high in search engine results.
I was surprised to find out recently that press releases can be bought; it isn’t necessarily wrong, if it’s done to give information to people, and not just to dance all over the search results.

I do agree Karen…. there’s good and bad everywhere…. bottom line, it belongs to the consumer to make a choix éclairé …. ranking at the top in engine searches doesn’t mean much: those sites may be excellent, mediocre or even fraudulent…. but I like to give people credit, I believe they can separate the good from the bad and if not, well…. lesson learned the tough way! ;-)

P.S. I know what you mean by having the right to enter a classroom before it starts only when you have a paid membership… but actually, there is no real need for it since teachers (with or without paid membership) have their own content library (that can be public or kept private) that stays permanently in their classrooms… therefore there’s no need to get in the classroom beforehand to upload documents/videos/presentations/etc… unless they want to play Solitaire while waiting for the attendees… :P Therefore it isn’t for this added feature that teachers upgrade from free to paid membership…