Posts tagged ‘beta testers’

The BIG ANNOUNCEMENT: LessonPathways.com is now FREE for EVERYONE to use!  Please read the message from our founder, Richard Rasmus, below:

NEWS

We have exciting news to share with you about the future of LessonPathways.com!

We have decided to transform the Lesson Pathways site from a paid subscription-based service to one that is advertising- and donation-supported. As a result, if you are currently a subscriber we are canceling all paid subscriptions and invite everyone to use LessonPathways.com at no additional expense.
I know that we have many satisfied customers who are actively using Lesson Pathways with their students.  If you feel that our service is of value to you, we ask that you consider contributing to support Lesson Pathways and help allow us to continue to bring you this valuable educational resource.

BACKGROUND

When Lesson Pathways first launched in August 2009, we initially offered free 12-month subscriptions for those who agreed to fulfill Beta Tester roles.  Within a 4 day time period, over 4000 users signed up for free accounts! The feedback we have received on our service since then has been phenomenal.  Unfortunately, once we moved to a subscription based system, the number of paid purchases we received not enough to cover our operating costs.

While we are confident that we are offering a top-notch service, we are attempting to sell our service during a very difficult economic time.  We have received many emails from families who would like to use our service, but are unable to do so due to tight household budgets.

We have spent many hours trying to find a solution – something that will help us cover our operating costs AND provide an educational tool to families who need our help.  We believe we have come up with a viable plan.  However, we will need your help – the help of the Lesson Pathways community – in order to make it work.

Our new approach, called a “freemium business model” is currently being used by sites like Facebook, Flickr, and Skype.  These sites offer a valuable free service, attract a very large number of users, and receive income when users click on affiliate and paid advertisements.  Over the course of the next few days we will switch Lesson Pathways over to a similar revenue model and we hope we can count on your support!

HOW YOU CAN HELP

We are hopeful that by changing the fundamentals of how we operate, we can continue to improve and expand our educational offerings. In addition to considering making a donation to Lesson Pathways, we hope you will help us in the following ways:

Share Lesson Pathways with anyone you think might be interested in our free service: face-to-face, postings in online forums and blogs, and on Facebook, Twitter or any other social or educational network to which you belong.

Support our advertisers and sponsors and buy educational and other supplemental materials by clicking on affiliate links you find on our site, such as links for Amazon books displayed with the Pathways.  Also consider shopping through the Lesson Pathways Online Shopping Mall, where you will find a variety of popular online stores.

Contribute content and help us maintain our site.  There are numerous ways to share your thoughts about our service or the sites we feature, such as commenting on our pages or flagging broken links.  We also hope that more experienced users will help newcomers by answering questions and offering support on our user forum.  In addition, we hope those of you who have a keen interest in education will volunteer to help us create new content.  This can be done by offering guest blog entries, suggesting alternative sites to feature, or creating new Pathways that reflect your own interest, knowledge, and educational philosophy.

Thank you again for your support.  We hope you will continue to be a valuable part of the Lesson Pathways community and will help us during our transition period and beyond!

Please visit our Free Service FAQ’s Page or feel free to contact our customer service department at ContactUs@LessonPathways.com if you have any questions, comments or concerns you would like to discuss.

Last week, we told you about our exciting partnership with the Homeschool Buyer’s Co-Op to bring you an awesome deal on an annual LessonPathways.com subscription.

The current price is only $49.99 for a full year’s subscription for your entire family.  That’s 50% off our normal annual subscription rate!  The Homeschool Buyer’s Co-Op has generously agreed to extend this offer through 1pm EST, February 3rd.

If you haven’t taken advantage of this phenomenal group-buy price, please don’t delay.  This special offer is only available through the Homeshcool Buyer’s Co-Op.  Be sure to stop by their Group Buy page and don’t forget to tell a friend.

When our subscribers talk, we listen!  We’ve received overwhelmingly positive feedback about the quality and quantity of Pathways found on LessonPathways.com.  Users love the flexibility to use the Pathways as a core curriculum for grades K – 5 or use it to supplement an existing curriculum.

“Thank you so much, you are awesome.  I have never seen my child so enthusiastic about doing school work!”

-Carol C.

LessonPathways.com Subscriber

One thing was  missing, however. According to our subscribers, it was the ability to print from our site.  We are happy to announce you can now print any Guided Journey, Pathway or Stepping Stone right from LessonPathways.com!

Printing any page from our site to add to your portfolio or lesson plan book is as easy as a few clicks of the mouse.  Look for the printer icon in the upper right hand corner of the page you wish to print.

After clicking this icon, a printable version of your Pathway will appear in a new window and automatically queue to your printer.  Simply select your personal printing preferences to print the page and close the window.

The printable version removes the navigation tree, banner and tabs.

Thank you, loyal subscribers, for your feedback and suggestions.  We’ll continue to work on site enhancements if you continue to provide the ideas!  Join us on our user board to let us know what you think!

This word cloud was generated from a free text field included in our survey, asking our Beta Testers to describe LessonPathways.com

Recently, we received the results of our second survey of nearly 2,000 beta testers who have been using Lesson Pathways since early August. I wanted to share the results and comment on some of the implications and what we hope to do about them.

We have conducted two surveys, one in late August, and this followup conducted in late September.

We are very encouraged and gratified by the results. In all the major categories surveyed, our results have improved across the board (see the bottom of this post for details).
Most of our questions provided 5 ratings slots that said in various ways our performance ranged from “very good” to “very bad.” Often, researchers will make comparisons based on how many people rate a product or service in one of the “top-two” boxes of a survey–in effect, “very good” or “good.”

Here’s a summary of how we did in that respect on the major questions:

How Likely are you to recommend Lesson Pathways to a friend?

Over 94% said they were very likely or somewhat likely to recommend us. That’s an 11-percentage-point increase from the month before.

How satisfied are you with our website?

Similarly, over 93% said they were very likely or somewhat likely to recommend us, an increase of 14 percentage points.

I’m so proud to say that I have rarely, if ever, been associated with a service that has inspired such a high level of satisfaction.

But, of course, we’re not perfect.

In our first survey, we received “top-two-box” scores of only 45% when asked if they found better than or exactly what they were looking for, only 57% with respect to “ease of navigation” and only 56% with respect to rating our layout/design. As a result of that survey, we worked hard for the last month to make sure we were clearer in explaining how to use our service overall and exactly what to do when arriving at third-party web content.

Therefore, I’m particularly delighted to report that this time we received comparable scores of nearly 83% , 65% and 65% respectively, increases of 38, 8 and 9 percentage points from the prior month. We’re still not where we would like to be, but we’ll keep working at it, with your help.

On the next four questions relating to the “freshness,” “accuracy” and “quality of our content, approximately three-quarters or better of the participants rated us in the top two boxes, each an improvement of 4 to 10 percentage points higher than the prior month.

The response to our question about customer service needs some explanation. Only 66% put us in one of the top two boxes (an 8-percentage-point improvement). This was a great concern until we noticed that only 52% of those surveyed responded at all. That left 5% who rated our customer service below average. However you interpret these results, you can be assured we will be working hard to figure out how we can do better.

In order to keep making improvements that matter, we need your input. For example, last month the number one and two requests we received from our beta testers were that we should make it easier to move all Pathways for a year into the student planner, and to add additional grades. We’re happy to report that we did both (in addition to fixing a number of small but aggravating bugs. Today, we’re hearing that a lot of people would like to be able to print more of our material, so we’re working on that.

Please let us know what else you’d like to see us do for you and your family by commenting below, sending a note to us at email address feedback@LessonPathways.com, or posting or responding to an idea on our customer forum, which registered members can access by clicking here: http://forum.lessonpathways.com/.

I hope you find it useful to see this statistical summary of how your fellow registered members like our service:

How Likely are you to recommend Lesson Pathways to a friend?

How satisfied are you with our website?

Were you able to find what you were looking for?

Please rate the ease of navigation

Please rate the freshness of our content

Please rate the accuracy of our content

Please rate the quality of Pathways

Please rate the quantity of Pathways

Please rate our layout/design

Please rate our customer service

How well does LP meet your needs?

To give you qualitative insights into how some of our members use our service, I’ll share some excerpts from the comments section in my next posting.

This post was written by Richard R., founder of Lesson Pathways.