Jared and I, well, more Jared than I, rolled out a major feature today: Badges.  This has been something that Jared’s wanted to do for ages and we finally pulled it off.  If you take a look at your public eduFire profile today you’ll see a major change on the right hand side.  Here’s one for Marco C one of our higher ranked teachers:

What badges do is show visually your interactions with eduFire.  If you mouse over one of the badges you’ll see what the badge stands for:

So what you can see here is that Marco’s got his bronze and silver badges for Sessions Taught.  Yes, reflecting this week’s Olympics driven focus, badges are generally available in Bronze, Silver and Gold flavors.  If you just run the mouse cursor over the different badges on someone’s profile page then you can see what badges they have.  Sometimes we’ve made the badge criteria public — such as 20 sessions taught for a silver.  And, other times, we’ve kept it hidden because we wanted to make sure that people didn’t try to game the system in a negative fashion.  

So what are some of the badges for?  Well here’s a starting list of ways you can get badges:

• Playing Flashcards
• Creating Flashcards (teachers only)
• Filling out your profile page completely (picture, video, about me text for teachers, picture, about me text for students)
• Participating in the forums
• Teaching Sessions
• Taking Sessions
• Contributing ideas to the Ideas Board
• Rating Videos
• Making friends on the site
• Getting testimonials on the site (teachers only)
• etc; There’s more than a bit of whimsy in the badges that are available so might be surprised at what you see on different people’s profiles.

Three Special Badges: Apples, Chalk Boards, Flagged

There are three special badges:

 - Every student gets an apple badge to indicate that they’re ready to learn

 - Every teacher gets a chalk board to indicate that they’re ready to teach

 - The flagged icon indicates that this person is an eduFire Community Manager.  While our whole community is usually willing to help people if you need assistance, an eduFire Community Manager is part of eduFire and should be even more able to help you.

Badges are automatically evaluated on the site every morning so you won’t see an immediate change to your badges until the next morning depending on what you do on the site.

Kudos to Jared for turning this feature around so quickly and doing just a bang up job on it.

One of the recurring requests that we’ve had on the Ideas board has been some sort of calendar integration for your eduFire appointments.  What Jared and I have just implemented allows you, from your eduFire dashboard, to add your eduFire sessions to your Internet enabled calendar such as Google Calendar, iCal, Outlook, Sunbird or another calendar that supports ics (Interest Calendar Standard) events.

Integrating eduFire with Google Calendar

Start by going to your eduFire Dashboard at http://edufire.com/dashboard.  You’ll now see some calendar links at the end of your upcoming sessions:

Now copy the url from the iCal link by using your right mouse (ctrl+click for Mac folk) since you need to paste it into Google Calendar.

(If you’re not yet a regular Google Calendar user goto your GMail account and click the Calendar link).

Once you’re in Google Calendar click the Add button and then select the Add by Url option from the drop down menu:

In the Add Other Calender page, paste in the url you copied from your eduFire dashboard above.

Now goto a date where you have a eduFire session and, voila!, you’ll see your eduFire session.

Now what’s great about both Google Calendar and Apple’s iCal is that these are dynamically updated as they change so you only have to subscribe once to your events and they’ll continue to update.

Known Issues

Due to bugs in Outlook 2003 you may not be able to have your eduFire sessions on the calendar.  Please upgrade to Office 2007 if this affects you.  Another workaround is the calendar built into Windows Vista.

Sidebar: What a Long Strange Trip it Will Be

Now whenever you implement calendaring features in a piece of software, without fail, you’ll generate some kind of bizarre error.  Here’s the one that Jared and I created yesterday:

Yes that is January 2,851,611 A.D.  Oy.  I guess that Morlocks will be able to learn to speak via eduFire.

Well the users have spoken:

I’m not a tutor, but I think this is a good idea. Someone could charge a lot more for a language that is harder to get help with.
Liz on the eduFire Ideas Board

If even students think that teachers need more flexibility on charging them then clearly this is a feature eduFire needs.  And we have delivered!  With our new eduFire 2 code base that Jared and I took live last week you can now set different rates for the different subjects you teach.  Here’s how:

1. Goto your eduFire dashboard. (note that these steps require you’re an eduFire teacher and logged into the site).
    
2. Click the Your Profile link.
    
3. Click the Edit my Profile link.
    
4. Click the Edit My Subjects link.
    
5. Edit each of your subjects, setting a rate for them as needed.  If you’re an existing teacher with multiple subjects then they will have the same rate initially and you’ll need to make changes to each.

Enjoy!  Thanks to Liz and Candy for pushing us on this one.

One of the most popular suggestions on our Ideas Board has been whiteboard functionality. We’re happy to announce that we’ve now added it to eduFire!

With whiteboard you can do all sort of cool stuff including drawing shapes, adding in text, etc. There are really so many functions that it would be hard to describe them all here! There are some things that you can’t do yet including sharing images and documents through the whiteboard but that’s something we hope to add in the future. And for those of you who requested the sharks with laser beams unfortunately we couldn’t do that for you this time.

We’re excited to continue to make eduFire better for tutors and students. If you’re currently doing sessions on the site we’ll look forward to your feedback on the new whiteboard functionality. And if you haven’t done a session yet consider this your perfect excuse to give it a try!

Thanks and to those of you in the States, enjoy the long Holiday weekend!!!

Today’s new feature is pulled straight from the eduFire idea board: Sortable Tutors. What we’ve done is added several links to the top of the tutors display so you can sort by:

• Featured
• Online Now
• Top Rated
• By Price
• Time Zone

I’d like to extend our thanks to Liz, one of our students for so succinctly requesting this and describing it clearly.

We also released a partial fix to a call for More Profile Info.

But What about My Feature …

Just to address a question that I expect will come up, the order in which we address these isn’t always strictly most votes / highest ranked. Sometimes its going to fall victim to engineering realities. Both of these features really fall into the “low hanging fruit” category — small enough to get done in an afternoon. Jared and I knocked out a bunch of bugs this morning and then needed to pick something that was self contained enough to be doable. No favoritism here to Liz; just being practical.

eduFire’s latest feature is, admittedly, a small one but one that shows our committment to listening to our users and taking direction from them. Why what am I talking about, well the Ideas Board:

What the ideas board gives you, the eduFire user, is a way to tell us what features you want (the ideas) and then let the overall eduFire community rank those features and comment on them. Here’s a same feature from Tina, one of our students:

What Tina has asked for is more search features and given us details as to how she wants them to work. Now we, the eduFire team, can also see that its rated as 4 stars and has (currently) 2 votes for it. We can also see any comments that other users have on it. This is a huge win for us because while everyone usually says they want every feature possible, we can see how important those features are to the community as a whole based on the amount of interaction (comments, votes and ratings) a feature has.

Kudos to Matt Mullenweg
I’d like to extend a thank you to Matt over at Wordpress for giving us an awesome model of an idea board to start from (note — I suspect Matt didn’t personally write the WordPress idea board and this is really a thank you to be transferred to someone else). Thanks man.

Traditionally — as far any startup can use that word when they’re less than a full year old — eduFire has always been “schedule based”. What I mean by that is, until now, using eduFire meant a process something like this:

1. Go onto the site.
2. Find a teacher.
3. Propose (i.e. schedule) a session with them by specifying when you were available to learn.
4. If that time didn’t work for the teacher then respond to the time that worked for the teacher by either indicating yes you are available then or counter proposing a time.
5. Repeat step #4 a few times perhaps.
6. Join the session with your teacher when that time rolls around.

Sure it works but that’s a whole lot of steps to follow when all you want to do is learn Spanish from Marco. To address this, *drum roll please* we are delighted to respond to your requests and announce:

Here’s how this all works:

The teacher’s profile page now incorporates two new buttons:

• Get Introduced
• Do a Session Now

The Get Introduced button lets you take a free, 10 minute, no obligation trial of a teacher and determine if they are the right teacher for you. During this introduction you have a full video session with the teacher along with text chat and its designed to give you a feel for the teacher. At the end of the session you can even roll into a full session with the teacher.
The Do a Session Now button lets you jump right into a session with a teacher and begin learning right away.
After either Get Introduced or Do a Session Now you’ll see a screen something like this:

From this screen you can choose what subject to be tutored in and wait to see if your teacher is available:

Now when a teacher is available you’ll see this screen:

If you click on the Get Introduced link then you’ll end up in a video chat with your teacher:

And there you go — instant sessions!
Note: If you’re using the Do a Session Now link then things follow a similar procession.

Note: This post is written by Scott Johnson, one of the people behind the engineering driving eduFire. He’ll show up here more and more as we start blogging about our new features.
A new feature you’ll find on eduFire is our just launched instant messaging. With our instant messaging feature you can:

• See whenever a teacher is online
• Send them a question instantly
• Arrange times for future sessions interactively — “Is next tuesday @ 10 good for you” instead of going back and forth proposing and counter proposing a session
• Pass documents back and forth with your teacher

Here’s some screenshots to show how this works:

Teachers or students online now are indicated with a green box around their profile picture.

To chat with someone select the Invite to Chat link.

Here you are in the chat room talking with your teacher or student.

And if you’re on eduFire but need to control your availability because you have an upcoming session and don’t want to be instant messaged then you can always set yourself to invisible. Teachers also have an additional setting, Ready to Teach, to explicitly indicate when they’re ready for teaching and taking on clients.

A new feature you’ll find on eduFire is our Top Friends feature. What this does is let you manage your friend list so that certain people are always shown. These people are called your “Top Friends”.

eduFire is a site for live video language learning and to provide the “live video” aspect we use the user’s webcam along with a web based Flash application.  Now, being web based, you’d assume that this would just work — and it almost always does.  But “almost” is a tricky word and there are always edge cases that don’t work correctly, and for this, we have released our “Flash Tester”.  What this does is let you use your webcam with our Flash application only for the purposes of seeing if you are configured correctly.  To try it goto this url:

http://edufire.com/video_test/

What you’ll see here is a screen like this:

If you click on the big, blue “click here to start” button then you should see something like this:

Of course you should see your own face in the video, not mine (yes that’s me; Hi everyone!).  If you continue following through with the Flash Tester you can also check your audio.

Enjoy!