eofficehours.com

2007-02-05T23:52:00.000-08:00

Welcome Back

So its a new year, and its been a while since I last updated this blog! And things have changed! (In a good way). Looking back at 2006, we achieved some great milestones. I don't know if everyone realizes this, but we released 6 new versions of VirtualOffice, and 5 versions of HomeRoom!! And we aren't even close to adding and refining as many features as we have planned!

This year is going to be amazing. We are going to be releasing a revolutionary new technology that will speed up your course websites that we spent the past several months developing and refining. We are also working on a really cool online quiz and test generator that will allow you to automatically grade your students exams and tie directly into your grade books. Additionally we be releasing more features that let you share your resources and websites with other teachers. You will also notice us refining many of the existing features to make them easier to use and more powerful.

As always, this service and company has been built for you, our teachers. You are our investors, our clients, and ultimately, we report to you. So please keep the feedback coming, without it we wouldn't be where we are today.

Cheers, Dan

2006-11-18T11:14:00.000-08:00

VirtualOffice 2.6 and HomeRoom 1.4 Released!

Its official folks, VirtualOffice 2.6 and HomeRoom 1.4 have been released! So what's new with each release? We chose to go in a slightly new direction for these two releases.

VirtualOffice is pretty well rounded at this point. You have a grade book, forums, drop boxes, custom pages, document download sections, announcements, and much more. A teacher using VirtualOffice has a lot of tools to use! So we decided to make VirtualOffice a bit more fun to use by allowing teachers to create their own unique styles to use for their course websites! We also decided that with the release of Internet Explorer 7 and its awesome new RSS feed reader, we would start letting each course website you guys build have its own RSS broadcast! So in summary:

Custom Styles: Sure we have some good looking styles to offer you, but why not let you also have the option to create your own unique style? With the custom style tool you can create, save, and edit as many custom styles for your courses as you want! The sky is the limit!
Course RSS Feeds: Your student have HomeRoom, which does a great job of keeping them informed of what's going on in your class, but what if they could get a live feed of everything going on, even if they aren't on your website or in HomeRoom? We at E-Office Hours are all about communication, so the new RSS feed generator will automatically create a live RSS broadcast for your students to subscribe to. You don't have to do anything! What's even cooler is that every course you create has its own broadcast!

So what did we do with HomeRoom? HomeRoom is about getting help and keeping informed. We have the keeping informed part down pretty well, and students can ask teachers questions, post to forums, or even ask their Virtual TA a question! But all of this limits the student to interactions solely within their classes. We have extended their network of help to the entire HomeRoom community! Now they can get help with any subject using our awesome online study group feature! In summary:

Online Study Groups: As stated above, the more people you can ask for help, the better your chances are of getting it. So with our new study group feature, students can create or join online study groups through their HomeRoom, and get instant access to our network of thousands of students. Each study group allows students to post questions and comments to a private message board and share resources such as links and files with the rest of the group. If a student knows a great site to get info about human anatomy, or has a good PDF about solving quadratic equations, they can easily share it! Furthermore, students can create private study groups, where other students must be approved before they can join. As always, security is a top priority.

In addition to the above features, we have added some new security protocol's to our products, further tuned our products for faster performance, and much more! We hope you guys enjoy the new versions as much as we enjoyed creating them!

Cheers, Dan

2006-10-22T23:57:00.000-07:00

Neighborhood Watch

If you grew up in suburbia, you probably saw those neighborhood watch signs around, or you probably at least saw or heard about neighborhood watches on TV. The idea is simple: People watching out for their neighbors. Sure police are nice to have, but when they cant be there, its always nice to know that your neighbor has your back and is watching out for you.

In a recent email we sent out, we notified our users of a recent abuse within VirtualOffice. A very nice teacher reported that a couple of websites were created with inappropriate material, in violation of our service agreement. We basically had two options. 1) Cancel the accounts and hope it doesn't happen again, or 2) cancel the accounts and take immediate action. We chose option 2.

Our users mean a lot to us. Heck, without them, there is no E-Office Hours! We are always delighted to get feedback from our users (good or bad) and we continue to endorse a policy of honesty when it comes to communication. This is why we decided to let our users know a week in advance of the steps we would be taking to lock down and secure E-Office Hours.

After some pretty lengthy debates and several good ideas, we decided that a neighborhood watch was the best option for securing E-Office Hours and preventing unwanted people from signing up. The idea is that from now on, whenever a new user signs up, we will notify everyone at their school using VirtualOffice. We then allow all users at their school to verify that they know the new user. If they are verified, great! If not, we at E-Office Hours are notified and perform an independent verification on that new user. I can't disclose what that process is for security reasons, but its pretty extensive. A new user can still set up their website and build the classes, but they just cant be added to their school officially until they are verified. This essentially means that students cant find the new user's course websites using our website.

This new neighborhood watch system achieves 2 goals:

Our software and its users (teachers, students, parents) are further protected and safe.
Our users are not hindered and stopped from performing their work, or otherwise severely restricted from using VirtualOffice.

During the week we allotted for user feedback, we had a lot of positive emails, giving us overwhelming support for our new security measures. Some teachers even volunteered to verify colleagues in the district as well as their school!!! So now that its out the door, the E-Office Hours community can rest assured that everyone is watching out for them, and that they are safe. Its a good feeling, isn't it?

Cheers, Dan

2006-09-02T00:54:00.000-07:00

VirtualOffice 2.5 Released!

So VirtualOffice 2.5 is finally out the door, and although it may not seem like a big release in terms of tons of new features, it is huge in other ways. First and foremost a lot of you will notice the new "Teacher Chat" button. This is a new section we just added for teacher forums that will allow our VirtualOffice users to talk and collaborate across the globe. This is the first of many new collaboration features to come.

VirtualOffice started out as a tool to help teachers quickly build powerful course websites to supplement and help their students classroom experience. As the VirtualOffice community continues to grow around the world, so does the need for communication. We are therefore in the midst of building the first teacher collaboration environment available, and by linking it directly to our VirtualOffice tools, will create a very powerful teaching resource and tool.

In addition to the Teacher Chat forums, you will notice the addition of the grade book. Its finally here!!! The new grade book allows you to quickly enter grades, compute averages, apply weights and grade scales, and deliver grades to your students in a quick and private manner. We are already working on additional features for the grade book that will allow you to collect detailed stats on your students grades, make custom notes, and much more.

We will be testing the new version in production all weekend, so please be patient and be sure to tell us if you encounter any problems. Stay tuned for more exciting releases!

Cheers, Dan

2006-08-13T22:33:00.000-07:00

CNet.com Reviews E-Office Hours

For those of you not familiar with CNet.com, they are a big name in the technology world. They review and write about any and all things technology. As such, they are very respected in the high tech industry.

We at E-Office Hours were delighted and proud to learn that they took the time to review VirtualOffice! You can check out the review at:

http://reviews.cnet.com/4531-10921_7-6627068.html

Technology is changing and evolving all the time. Teachers not only have to deal with their students, classrooms, and various daily challenges, but increasingly they are being asked to incorporate more technology into the classroom. So what we have tried to do is make the transition as easy as possible by designing VirtualOffice to be as user friendly and simple as possible to use without sacrificing the latest technological advances the web has to offer.

Our ambition and goal was validated when Mr. Needelman said that "it's free and it's simple, and it's easier to set up a Web site for a course with a tool such as this than it would be to apply a general-purpose Web publishing tool to the job. "

We hope that this will be the first amongst many positive reviews to come, but regardless we will continue to build the best product available, and the only product of this caliber available to you for free!!

Cheers, Dan

P.S. As Mr. Needleman said, the grade book will be released very soon! It's currently in testing and will be released in a matter of weeks.

2006-07-26T01:05:00.000-07:00

Grades, Grades, Grades

So what does every teacher have in common? Well for one, they all do grades! (for the most part at least). As I've stated time and again, this venture is about you, the teachers, students and educational community at large. Its about what you want, what you need, and about getting it to you quickly and effectively.

With that in mind, this upcoming release is going to be a bit different. I am going to go against convention, and tell you that in our next release we will be giving you a grade book! We have already spoken to several teachers and have a pretty good list of features that will be introduced for the grade book, but we also realize that every teacher has their own style of grading, and so as hard as we try, we wont be able to hit this one exactly on the head first time around, but we do want to try. We will be sending out a formal survey to all of you very soon outlining our current feature set for the first version of the grade book, asking you to vote on your preferred features, and giving you the opportunity to suggest features you would like to see! But before we do that, I thought I would start an informal discussion here to get some ideas. So here is what you will see in the first version of the grade book:

Add an Assignment: Easily add a new assignment column to your grade book (including name, point value, etc.)
Quick Edit: Edit any grade by clicking it, simulating writing on a piece of paper, its real time!
Sort: Sort your grades by students, or any assignment score.
Export/Import: Export your grade book to an excel spreadsheet, or import your grades into your VirtualOffice.
Print Friendly: Generate a clean, print friendly version of your grades to post up.
Apply Weights: Apply a bell curve or other method to your grade book.
Publish: Make your grades available to your students in their HomeRoom. This would ensure absolute privacy to all your students.

Anyway, this is a short list, and we have tones more ideas, but those will be saved for future releases. In the mean time though, we would love to hear about features you would like to see!

Cheers, Dan

2006-07-09T23:55:00.000-07:00

VirtualOffice 2.4 is Out!

All the hard work has paid off! VirtualOffice 2.4 is out! As most of you already know by now, we have just released the latest version of VirtualOffice. This was a relatively big release.

So what did we add? In summary:

Course Glossary: Students need to know terms and definitions, and sure you could put your own glossary page together using our webpage creator, but we thought we would take it further, and let you not only add terms and definitions in a snap, but also let your students suggest their own terms and definitions! In case you haven't noticed, we believe that your website (like your classroom) should be interactive. Even cooler is the auto-indexing feature! Every time you create a glossary word, our technology will auto-index your entire website and turn every instance of a glossary word into a pop up definition word! All your student has to do is place their mouse over the word, and the definition pops up! How cool is that?! I know I could have used that when I was in school.
Forum Upgrades: This one comes directly from our users (special thanks to Felicia Estrada and Marjory Thrash on this one!). Sure our forums are easy to set up and easy to use, but why not make them a bit more powerful? To do that, we are now allowing you and your students to attach a document to any post your create, and we allow you to add quick comments and posts to any existing post, allowing you add your 2 cents (or more if you like) to any existing post.
Messaging System Upgrade: Once again, this one comes from our users. Many times teachers want to send messages to groups of students or parents. Our new groups feature allows you to create custom groups of website users (teachers or students) that you can then send messages to.
Tell-A-Friend: I've said it before, and I'll say it again. We love our users! And we like to think they like us too :) So we have added a new feature that lets you (our users) spread the word quickly and conveniently from your VirtualOffice. Simply fill in the names and emails of friends and colleagues who might be interested in VirtualOffice, and we'll send them some quick info! We do not save any of the information you submit, and under no circumstances do we spam.
Upgrades, Upgrades, Upgrades: We love upgrades! We are always looking for new ways and new technology to make things run faster and smoother for you, and we've done it again! Our new upgrades should make your experience a lot better and faster.

That covers the major new features, and I hope you enjoy them! We have been getting a lot of great feedback from our users lately (ranging from 4th grade teachers to university profs), so we must be doing something right. Time to start working on the next big release! Stay tuned.

Cheers, Dan

2006-06-29T23:47:00.000-07:00

Schools Out For the Summer....

Well not really. Even though summer is here, we're not slowing down, and either are schools. We've already had a good number of summer school classes sign up to use VirtualOffice for their classes, and we will be continuing to release new features and products throughout the summer.

So what's in store for the summer? First of all, VirtualOffice 2.4 will be out next week. We are in full testing mode right now making sure that all the features and upgrades are working smoothly. Without elaborating and giving away too much, we will be releasing a new one-of-a-kind feature that is sure to be popular among teachers and students.

So what about the rest of the summer? We are beginning work on a new tool for schools and are already planning for the next releases of VirtualOffice, HomeRoom, and ParentLink.

I'll be sure to post more as soon as VirtualOffice 2.4 is released.

Cheers, Dan

2006-06-07T00:50:00.000-07:00

All Work and No Play (well some play)...

Make VirtualOffice a better product!!! That's right, we're hard at work on VirtualOffice 2.4. Due to be released at the end of June/beginning of July, its going to include some nice new features for the forums, messaging system, a new face lift for a couple of pages, a couple of brand new features, and some upgrades to existing ones. On top of all of this, were also going to be throwing in some more speed improvements and enhancements.

How can we do all this you ask? Oompa Loompa's. They even sing the songs every time one of us makes a mistake!!!! Ok, so its not Oompa Loompa's, but rather some good old fashioned hard work. In addition to VirtualOffice 2.4, we are working on some upgrades for HomeRoom, and have just finished a new product going into beta testing (sorry, its still under wraps, can't give too much detail). In short, too much to do, and too little time to do it in.

Once again, if anyone has any features they would like to see, or features they absolutely hate, this is a great place to let us know! You could also email us at support@eofficehours.com, and we'll make sure the email gets to the right people.

Cheers, Dan

2006-05-19T01:42:00.000-07:00

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Hi all, tonight I thought I would reflect a bit on the philosophy of the company. I was fortunate enough to receive the text from Steve Job's commencement speech at Stanford for last years graduating class. He emphasized how important it is to do what you love, and to never compromise on that. That seems pretty obvious these days, but what I really liked is how he explained why we need to do it.

Its been almost 3 years since I first decided that I wanted to start a company. I've worked countless late nights, given up weekends, winter and spring breaks, not to mention a lot of my savings, to try build something I could be proud of. There have been times where I seriously thought about quitting, and I was damn close, but what always stopped me was that little voice in my head telling me to keep going a little further, never have any regrets. I'm either going crazy (I hope not, I'm too young!), or I made the right choice. Looking back, I'm glad I made the choice to continue.

Mr. Jobs talked about a publication called "The Whole Earth Catalogue" that he subscribed to. He explained:

"When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry"

I can really identify with the quote, "Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish". I think it best sums up our hopes and drive for E-Office Hours. Dare to dream (stay foolish) and always reach for the impossible (stay hungry) has in many ways become our mantra.

Cheers, Dan

2006-05-13T00:08:00.000-07:00

Bottoms Up!

In talking to many teachers we are often asked what makes us so much different from our competitors (aside from the great technology and no cost of our products). And the first thing I always mention is our "bottom up" approach. That's usually followed by a blank expression.

So what is the "bottom up" approach? Well to explain it, its best to understand what the "top down" approach is first. In simple terms, its a method employed by all our competitors. A teacher wanting to use their product can only do so once their school (or institution) has adopted it (bought it). So in essence, they receive their marching orders (using the technology) from the top, and are thus at the mercy of their schools administrators, budget surpluses/shortages, etc. So given that, many of our competitors design their products to (1) appeal to the administration, (2) the budget (sometimes), and finally (3) the teacher.

The "bottom up" approach, which we have started to coin, aims to reach the teacher separately from the administration. That is the teacher has direct access and control over the technology they NEED, and don't have to worry about budget shortages, administration changes, etc. Furthermore, it leaves us flexible enough to fill the needs of the administration separate from the teachers.

Let me give you an example. We are working on a product for entire schools right now, it will be subscription based only (very cheap, but not free, sorry folks). Say your school decides to purchase our solution. All your teachers set up VirtualOffice accounts and invest all their time and energy learning the tools and using them. Suddenly a massive budget crisis hits, and the first thing to go is the school wide learning management system purchased from E-Office Hours. With any other tool you would loose the time and effort (not to mention the money) spent in setting up your websites and really using the tool. But with E-Office Hours, you as the teacher would still maintain ultimate control over your classroom website through VirtualOffice. If the next year your school finds that it can afford our learning management system again, it wouldn't affect you, since your free VirtualOffice would have been unaffected. The point is that you as the teacher are always in control, in every sense of the word.

Hope this helps explain a bit more about why we are so unique and why you won't find anything else out there that even comes close to what we're doing.

Cheers, Dan

2006-05-09T23:36:00.000-07:00

You Use A Lot AJAX! I Guess You Have a Pretty Dirty Bathroom!

Well the state of my bathroom isn't really up for discussion, but our use of AJAX is! I thought tonight I would take some time to talk about the types of technology we use and why use them from a much less technical perspective, and more from a user experience perspective, and how it impacts you, our users.

If you've heard of AJAX, great! If not, it stands for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML, which probably doesn't mean too much to you. What's important is that its a technology that's been around for over 9 years now, and has recently become very popular due to new programs offered by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. What it does is allows your web applications (Hotmail, Yahoo mail, Google search, etc.) to act more like desktop applications (MS Word, Excel, Outlook, etc.).

Let me give you an example of how we use it. When a student types a question in the Virtual TA question box, we use AJAX to try auto complete their question, which saves them typing time and does a behind the scenes search for matching questions without having to submit their question, which will save teachers time.

We also use drag and drop technology which helps you perform simple tasks much easier. For example, say you've created a lot of custom web pages and you want re-order them in your navigation menu. We allow you to click the pages and drag them to where you want them to be. This saves you time, and makes the interface more intuitive.

Our general philosophy is that life is complicated enough, so why should your software be?! Everything you need to do with our software can be done in one step with very few fields to fill in. For example, creating a custom web page is done in one step, filling in 3 fields. Adding student accounts is done in one step, filling in 2 fields, etc. Keep it simple, but effective.

So that said, if you ever find that something is really confusing, let us know! So far we've had some really great feedback, and a lot of our users have said that the interface is really easy to use, and hopefully now you have some idea of why!

Cheers, Dan

2006-05-08T00:38:00.000-07:00

Thank You Intel!

I wanted to share a great article from CNN about Intel's new initiative to promote the web in developing countries. Over the next 5 years they plan to spend one billion dollars to promote the web and train 10 million teachers to use technology in education (See Article Here).

This really seems to bring home the point that technology is becoming a more integral part of education. Furthermore, it stresses the need not only for free technology, but powerful technology. I also recently read an article about a project at MIT to produce cheap laptops to be made available to third world countries that would essentially be glorified web browsers.

The promise of the Internet is finally coming to fruition, where free services empower everyone to better their lives, and it seems that corporate America is also catching on. We are seeing that with many Google and Yahoo products, social networks like MySpace and The Facebook, and even email programs like Hotmail. The point is that you can connect to people all over the world essentially for nothing, and leverage those connections to enrich your life both socially and professionally. So naturally this makes us at E-Office Hours even more eager and inspired to get our message out there that we plan on being a big part of this movement of free technology to the masses, and will continue to expand our products and product offerings to meet the needs of teachers and students everywhere. I know I've said it before, but I'll say it again: You, our users and partners, are our best advocates, so if you like what were doing, continue to spread the word!!

Cheers, Dan

2006-05-04T00:02:00.000-07:00

Pop Quiz!

I thought I'd take a moment to talk about one of the new features we are cooking up for VirtualOffice 2.4. One of our major goals during the development of all our products has been to match our competitors (open source and commercial) feature for feature in addition to developing some more cutting edge features not available anywhere else (i.e. the Virtual TA, FAQs, and the concept of an adaptive knowledgebase). Obviously we offer it for free, and make the interface as simple and user friendly as possible. We like to think that we're the best of all worlds, because we are!

To achieve that goal, we are working on a new tool to let teachers easily build quizzes for their students. The goal is to make a very simple interface that lets you add a question, choose what kind of question you want it to be (multiple choice, fill in the blank, etc.), and select whether you want it timed or not. Also, we want to let you do all this from one page and make it feel like you're writing it down on a piece of paper. To achieve this, we are employing some new cutting edge tricks we promise you won't find anywhere else. So if we have a quiz tool, you're probably wondering about a grade book. Don't worry, we're on it :) Its in the works, but might not make VirtualOffice 2.4, but will definitely be there soon.

In addition to the quiz tool, we are working on another new product, so please be patient as we work on the next release of VirtualOffice 2.4 and our next product.

Cheers, Dan

2006-05-02T01:26:00.000-07:00

What's In A Name?

So we often get asked where our name comes from? I thought I would take a couple of minutes to address that. So the original idea centered around the office hours experience, which in my personal experience was one of the richest learning environments available to a student. It was the time when I could get all my questions asked and answered, talk to students about forming study groups, pick up my exams and homeworks, go over questions I missed or didn't understand, and much much more. A lot of the interactions that occur between students and teachers during office hours are usually very natural and spontaneous, and are hard to reproduce.

So the goal in forming E-Office Hours was to mimic and adapt that office hours experience for web, capturing that spontaneity in a meaningful way that students could use in a meaningful way. Hence office hours online, or E-Office Hours. That, and www.eofficehours.com wasn't taken yet! I hope that helps :)

Cheers, Dan

2006-05-01T00:44:00.000-07:00

New Release!

After a weekend of acceptance testing and a couple of tweaks, I'm happy to announce the release of ParentLink 1.0 and VirtualOffice 2.3.1. As I mentioned before, ParentLink will allow parents to take a more active role in their student's education by seeing first hand what the student sees in their course websites. Furthermore, it will enable the parent to communicate directly with their student's teacher's using our built in messaging system.

VirtualOffice 2.3.1 includes several bug fixes, some performance enhancements, and for the first time, the ability to choose between 2 styles of websites! This new feature allows user's to choose a website style in addition to a color, giving them a total of 22 options. The new style is more polished, has fewer sharp lines, and gives teachers two very distinct choices. We will be adding more styles in future releases, further enabling teachers to make their websites more unique. We decided to label this release of VirtualOffice 2.3.1 instead of 2.4 since no real new functionality was introduced, but rather improved functionality to existing features and a lot of speed and performance tuning. VirtualOffice 2.4 is currently being worked on and will include some cool new features! We are also hard at work on HomeRoom 1.2 and we've even started planning out ParentLink 1.1! If that's not enough, we are currently working on 2 more stealth projects and are beginning planning on yet another 2. As always, stay tuned!

Cheers, Dan

2006-04-27T23:17:00.000-07:00

Meet ParentLink

Its finally here, the next product in our line up. ParentLink (to be released this weekend) is our first product directly targeted at parents. It allows parents to hook onto their students HomeRoom accounts and view a very limited subset of what's going on in their courses, gives them guest access to their students course websites, and allows them to message the student's teachers directly using the same messaging system as HomeRoom.

Many of the features we have released so far in VirtualOffice and HomeRoom have sought to address secondary and post secondary education, but ParentLink will allow us to give some more attention to the under served secondary education market (junior high schools and high schools). In speaking to many high school teachers, we realized that parent participation was difficult, but none the less essential. As ParentLink evolves, it will grow to let parents talk to each other and help build a supportive network that allows their kids to grow without intruding too much in their development.

Please free to let us know what you think! We are always open to suggestions, comments, and concerns. We're not done yet. Stay tuned for more information on our VirtualOffice release this month!

Cheers, Dan

2006-04-27T00:25:00.000-07:00

Traffic Jam

We got a report that the site slowed down a bit in the middle of the day. If anyone experienced that, it's because we had a little bit of a surge in traffic today, but things calmed down pretty quickly. We have actually made some serious performance improvements to the site (including VirtualOffice and HomeRoom) that will be rolling out within the next couple of weeks that we expect to speed up things up to five fold in some places. So something to look forward to! (for us at least)

Cheers, Dan

2006-04-25T23:55:00.000-07:00

The Survey Is In

We recently conducted a survey at UC Santa Cruz for a class of about 100 students who used VirtualOffice for a quarter (thanks Kestrel for all your help!), and the results are in! Most students said the system was really easy to use, and they really found it helpful. We even had a few responses that said they liked VirtualOffice better than the school's current website solution, WebCT. This was especially encouraging.

I'm going to be compiling the exact statistics over the next week as I find time, but I'll be sure to post them as soon as they are finished. Sorry for the short post, but I'm swamped with work right now, so I better get back to it. Just thought I would share that piece of news.

Cheers, Dan

2006-04-24T22:13:00.000-07:00

Hot Off The Presses

Everything we do in life (for the most part) has a reason or justification behind it, and starting E-Office Hours was no exception. In a perfect world I would spend all my time working 100% on our products, but sometimes I have to switch roles and do a little marketing. Part of that job requires that I scour the Internet in search of articles and news about developments in our market (i.e. educational technology), and in part continue to remind myself of our "reason". One of my colleagues came across a very fascinating article today.

Apparently Michigan is now requiring that all graduating high school seniors take at least one online course before graduating (http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060423-6657.html). This presents several interesting problems, the most obvious of which being budget. I recently met with a local educator, who told me that grant money for technology and funding in general is starting to dry up. So the question becomes, how can schools afford such initiatives. The obvious answer is E-Office Hours! Articles and news like this is in a way what drives us to get our message out there that there is a real option available.

I think understanding the need is the best way to serve our clients, so if anyone has a story they would like to share about budget cuts, or general frustration with trying to fund a technology initiative, please feel free to post a comment. Who knows, we may be able to do something to help!

Cheers, Dan

2006-04-22T21:36:00.000-07:00

The Never Ending Race

Well its Saturday, and I'm at home, catching up on some blogging! I should probably be out, but I'm a little too tired today. Sorry I missed last nights post, I was up until 3 am working on our next product release, due out within the next 2 weeks hopefully.

So far we've been pushing pretty hard to keep our releases pretty regular at one feature release every month. Its pretty ambitious, considering typical companies only see a feature release every 3 to 4 months. But hey, we aren't aiming to be just any typical company! As I said before, we are lucky enough to have some really great users (such as Marjory Thrash, thanks for all the feedback Marjory!) who really push us to go that extra mile. So for everyone using VirtualOffice or HomeRoom (or is considering using it), I want to remind you that these are your products, so if you want something that's not already there, let us know!

I guess you could say its our never ending race to keep up with our customers and try make the product their own. If you're wondering what our next product is going to be, tune in next weekend when we make the announcement. We currently have 6 (possibly 7, will decide soon) products lined up, so our plates (and schedule) are pretty full right now.

Cheers, Dan

2006-04-20T20:11:00.000-07:00

The History of Our World, Part 2

So far I've hopefully given a pretty good explanation of what exactly we are trying to do, but I think to really understand the what, one has to know the why (in particular, this is my own why). I was and still am dyslexic, although I've managed to learn to compensate for it, and somehow I managed to double major in college in computer science and applied mathematics.

Growing up with dyslexia, I spent a lot of time after school with some great teachers and tutors who were willing to help me catch up with my classmates. I was lucky. As an adult I read about many students not so fortunate. School budgets are shrinking, class sizes are growing, schools are shutting down, and people are expecting teachers to somehow make up for the lost resources. Frankly it seems impossible. Just recently I read about schools shutting down all over San Francisco and Oakland, and it scares me. This is in big part why E-Office Hours was started.

I don't pretend to think that we can fix every problem, but I'm certainly willing to try. In an effort to do so we are already planning to build our company into more than just websites for teachers.

Imagine...

You're a student in America, and have a physics question. You ask our global Virtual TA, who gets the answer from a small town in Israel.
You're a teacher in Australia, and every student is asking that same last minute question, vital to their success for tomorrows exam. With one answer you can help your entire class and save yourself time.
You're a parent, and your student just doesn't get how to solve that math problem. You log into their account and show them where the answer lies on their teachers VirtualOffice.
You're a student studying French literature in England, and with the click of a button you can instantly connect to a tutor in France who sees everything you're working on exactly as you see it, and helps you in real time to understand that one concept that alludes you.

We are working on it. E-Office Hours has been and will be built for students and teachers, and the educational community they form. If you were ever a student in any form, taught in any way, then this product belongs to you as much as it does to us.

So I guess that's our history. I could go into much more detail, but once again, check out the site! Its all there. And please tell anyone you know who might need us.

Cheers,
Dan

2006-04-19T18:02:00.000-07:00

The History of Our World, Part 1

Today I thought I would start the first installment in a brief overview of what E-Office Hours is all about. First I'd like to introduce our 2 products (and in some ways my children): VirtualOffice and HomeRoom.

VirtualOffice is our flagship product built for teachers to quickly put up websites for their classes. I won't go into much detail about the features (you can go to our website if you want to learn more), but the important thing is that its built for teachers, and as such in a very real way belongs to teachers. We have been lucky enough to have some very satisfied users who have been kind enough to give us some good feedback (in fact one of them called me from Indiana the other day to tell me personally!!!). As a result, the product has been built directly around teachers and their needs, rather than the school as a whole.

HomeRoom is our flagship product built for students. Once again, I'll spare you all the details (check out the website), but its important to keep in mind that HomeRoom is all about communication. Communication between students and teachers is what makes it so useful. HomeRoom was a great project to work on because I was able to draw on so many of my experiences as a student.

I was that one student you always saw in the professor's office hours, asking tons of questions, on a first name basis with my professors. That is actually the reason we called the company E-Office Hours (office hours online!). That interaction outside of the class probably taught me more than the lectures, and is in many ways what we've tried to do with our product line so far.

There's a lot more to the company than this small piece, but I'll save that for part 2 of our small history lesson. Also, please feel free to post your comments and questions here, I'd be happy to address them.

Cheers, Dan

2006-04-18T22:21:00.000-07:00

Welcome!

You've come to this blog, and you're probably wondering what it's all about. What is E-Office Hours? Why should you even care? Well in short, E-Office Hours is my story.

The short story is very simple: This is my vision, my passion, and what I hope to make a company with a social conscience that actually tries to make a positive difference in the world. The long story, however, is still being written.

First let me introduce myself. My name is Dan. I am a recent (if 2 years is recent) college graduate, and I started this company a little over 2 years ago while I was still at school, working night and weekends out of a rented room in the middle of town. Since then I've grown the company to include 5 more very talented people who I've somehow managed to convince that this whacky idea of mine (free websites and teaching tools for teachers and students) might really work! Our goal is simple: Connect students and teachers around the world in new ways, in an open, free environment.

So why start a blog? My goal is to give the company a personality, let people know that there is more to it than just a name, a website, and a few products. I am a strong believer that what makes a company work and succeed is the people who invest their time and hearts in it, and I hope to share our collective experiences and growth through this blog. I will be chronicling our story as it unfolds through this blog.

Thanks for taking the time to read my blog. The journey is just beginning, and with any luck, someday E-Office Hours will become a household name, who knows?! Stay tuned :)

Cheers, Dan