PShizzy: The Blog

After the huge success of the Lynda.com seven day trial, which was on again off again, I received an interesting email from another e-learning source, the Virtual Training Company, or VTC for short. I was interested for two reasons.

First, VTC has been around a while. They offered training cd’s over a decade ago, when the concept was still new. So VTC definitely has a solid background in application training. But the second reason is what caught me: The email was from Mark Vernon,  the founder of VTC.

vtc.com is an online learning library similar to lynda.com, but with 80,000 tutorial videos. We started in 1994, delivering online in 1997, so we’ve been around a bit longer than most.
Check out the library using a 7 day free pass, using promo code “twitter”, at vtc.com/promo
cheers

Mark Vernon

The Virtual Training Company

So please, feel free to sign up and give it a whirl. Read on for a short review of the material as well as my overall opinion.

I actually received this email about two weeks ago.I didn’t publish it then because I wanted to try out some of the videos myself, gather an opinion, and put that into the post for anyone interested. First the bad.

The site design for VTC.com is a bit aged. It’s definitely not as colorful or friendly as Lynda.com. Even the videos tend to feel a little more old school in their presentation and feel. The videos themselves are current (training is available for the Adobe CS4 applications, for example), they just look like they were put together by older technology.

The navigation is a little spartan as well. Lynda offers navigation with multiple drop down menus, allowing me to choose by subject, vendor, application, or even author. VTC offers navigation by subject, and then takes me to a page offering a list of applications. There is a search tool however, so typing in Photoshop will take you to all Photoshop related lessons.

So why would VTC.com use an older platform to showcase their videos?

My guess is that it’s to maintain compatibility with their own LMS (Learning Management System), which allows them to offer their training as a system for corporate clients. This is good and bad. It’s bad because there are obvious limitations to the technology behind the LMS. To maintain compatibility, they can’t go too cutting edge.

But the benefits are numerous. VTC offers courses in English, French, and Spanish, and subtitle captions for several videos. If you’re hearing impaired, speak Spanish or French, or simply like to read along with your videos, then VTC.com is for you. Lynda.com will only give you videos in English, with no captions. It’s good to have choices. I’m actually considering taking some of the Photoshop courses in Spanish (which I speak and read, but only at a basic level) in order to learn the lingo for creative applications in a different language.

They have nearly 80,000 videos, covering a gamut of applications that I never even knew existed. How bout networking and security? How bout learning a new programming language? VTC.com goes beyond the standard creative applications that Lynda.com does (though Lynda.com offers courses on certain niches like Ebay, and WordPress).

They offer Quicktime and Flash, as well as having a High and Low bandwidth option. This can be nice when you’re on the road using a wireless card rather than a dedicated home network. It also helps when you want to view something quickly rather than wait for the higher quality download.

Content wise, the training is solid. Personally, I don’t recognize many of the names of the trainers for either VTC or Lynda, but I’m not necessarily in the e-learning industry, so I don’t know the bigger names as far as online training is concerned. In fact, the one name I recognized instantly on Lynda, Deke McClelland, I recognized from Total Training videos I had viewed.

VTC seems to have hired people from around the world, as is evident by some of the accents. I kinda dig that, but it can also cause me to break concentration when I decide I’m quite happily trying to do an impersonation of the various accents.

On another note, I did recognize the Photoshop instructor, Dwayne Ferguson. Kind of a weird character, but as it turns out, he was the guy behind Mutant League Football. The earth cracks in half during a normal game, radioactive stuff turns players into all sorts of mutants, but wanting to keep earning that paycheck, they play on in a new mutant league. Anyone who knows me knows that mutants playing sports and ripping each others appendages off sounds like something I’d want to watch even now as an adult. Where were we? Oh yes.

VTC offers payment options for one, three, and six months, as well as a yearly. The cost is the same for each of the plans except the yearly, averaging 30 dollars a month. The yearly is priced at 250 dollars. This is about the same as Lynda.com, which offers a monthly of 25 dollars, or a yearly of 250.

Ultimately, it’s difficult to compare VTC to Lynda. They both try to achieve similar goals, but in very different manners. If we were going by style alone, Lynda.com would win. But that’s just window dressing. Content being the main selling point, VTC offers a lot more options and features that Lynda doesn’t match. But if you don’t need to take a course on Sharepoint, then some of the subjects that VTC offers training in may not mean much to you.

My advice is that you take the seven day trial to see if their offering suits you. The promo code will run through the end of April.

Tags: business, general, photoshop // 3 Comments »