If you are looking for a way to do extensive online training on online topics, then consider what Grovo.com has to offer. There are dozens of topics ranging from email etiquette to setting up Facebook ads to using Yammer, Stumble Upon, Google Analytics, Twitter and LinkedIn. While I didn’t try out very many courses, it does seem well thought out. Many large Fortune 1000 companies are using the service, too. In this era where training budgets are being slashed and where keeping up with the latest online technology is difficult, this is worth a closer look.
They claim there are more than a thousand individual lessons and there are more than 40 different social media courses, to give you an idea of how much content is available. The Twitter for Business collection alone has 22 different tutorial screencasts, all less than two minutes long, covering what is a hashtag, how to use the Twitter location services, and other details. This makes them easily digestible, although it can be tedious to consume a lot of this content in one sitting.
Each lesson collection has a quiz, a list of key takeaways, and a glossary, so the courseware is fairly complete and thorough. I took the overall unit quiz and got a respectable 82% after watching one lesson, which given that I was doing this in a noisy airport I though was pretty good. But that is the point here: you can go get your training on your time, when you have a spare few minutes (or hours, given what air travel delays are these days).
Every action is tracked on your own dashboard, so you can see at a glance which lessons you watched and any notes that you wanted to take as you go along (see screenshot below).
Having done my own screencast tutorials, I think their collection is well done (apart from the background music), clear and easily understood, and packed with tons of insight and information about the various online services that they focus on.
Starting tomorrow, they will offer their business customers some new features. They will be able to create a company wide group, ensure people sign up, assign courses to cover, track their progress and manage their activities.
You can get started with a free personal account, which gives you access to non-premium content mostly centered on consumer technology. The premium accounts, appropriate for business-oriented content, start at $9 per month per user.
