Nuvvo

Nuvvo is an on-demand e-learning service designed for individual instructors. It costs nothing to use, though it has some ads and gets a percentage if you charge students. Nuvvo is a website that incorporates AJAX, RSS/Atom, VoIP (via Skype), vCard, and ICalendar. Nuvvo has integrated e-commerce and an eLearning Market where courses can be advertised.

Similar Software Systems

A more popular type of e-learning system is designed for institutions, not individual instructors, and is usually called a Learning Management System (LMS), Course Management System (CMS), or Virtual Learning Environments (VLE).

Nuvvo includes most of the end-user features found in these systems, but specifically lacks the administrative features required for organizing large hierarchies of users, and integration possibilities for connecting with other software systems in an institutions IT ecosystem.

Origin of the Name & Logo

The name "Nuvvo" is a play on the French word "nouveau", which is the masculine form of the English adjective "new". This fabricated word "Nuvvo" held important attributes at the time of its selection:

A Google search of "nuvvo" returned only 33 results
The domain name nuvvo.com was available
At five characters, with one letter repeated, "nuvvo" is short and easy to type
"nuvvo" is relatively language-agnostic

One drawback of the name was that its easy to misspell in English, since very few words have consecutive 'v's. This problem was mitigated in the design of the Nuvvo logo, which in using two checkmarks for the two 'v's, accentuates the peculiar spelling. The checkmarks are à-propos because of their association to classroom education.

Background

Nuvvo was created by Savvica Inc., a Toronto-based software company founded by John Philip Green, and launched in December 2005. Green, Nuvvo's chief architect, has said that Nuvvo--a more compact version of an enterprise LMS designed for individual instructors--was conceived while Savvica was building its Enterprise LMS and released as a sort of side project. The idea took off. As the service attracted more and more users, the company gradually shifted its focus from enterprise learning software to the lighter, ASP service. Savvica now focuses solely on improving and supporting Nuvvo.

Features

Nuvvo shares many characteristics with other Web 2.0 services. It's service is entirely web-based, and follows the intuitive, user-centred design principles made popular by 37 Signals, among others. Like Flickr and del.icio.us, it's free and focused on user-generated content and community building.

Content authoring is featured, with tools for creating multimedia-enriched lessons, quizzes and assignments. Blogging is included, as are messages, scheduling tools, course management, and user administration. Unlike a traditional LMS setup, the conversations, media files, and text curriculum are all integrated and on the same page, facilitating discussion and student interaction.

Evaluation tools are another part of Nuvvo. Instructors build test, quizzes, and assignments with multiple choice questions, true/false questions, etc. Most question types are automatically graded and entered into Nuvvo's gradebook, where students can keep track of their progress.

Nuvvo also features e-commerce, which allows instructors to charge for courses. Instructors set a course price and students pay with their credit card upon joining the course. Nuvvo subtracts an 8% transaction fee and pays the instructor the rest. Instructors can list their courses in Nuvvo's eLearning Market, an Ebay-like listing site where students browse courses and request enrollment.

Technology

Server-side

Nuvvo is an Enterprise Java web application that runs in the Apache Tomcat web container.

The web application is composed of multiple tiers. The presentation tier uses the Struts MVC framework. The logic tier relies heavily on the Hibernate O/R Mapping framework. The data tier uses MySQL, though it is being replace by DB2 & an xkoto GRIDIRON database load-balancer.

Client-side

Nuvvo uses many modern Web 2.0-ish technologies.

AJAX for a more responsive user interface
RSS/Atom to syndicate course listings
VoIP (via Skype) for synchronous communication
vCard for importing from external address book applications
ICalendar to integrate with external calendaring applications
CSS for themes and user interface customization

External links

Official Nuvvo Homepage Links

Press/Reviews

Call for Help, G4TechTV Mar 30, 2006
LifeHacker Feb 23rd, 2006
TechCrunch Jan 16, 2006
Emily Chang Jan 6th, 2006

Founder Interviews

MarketingMonger April 10th, 2006
Web 2.0 Show Feb 27th, 2006
Ed TechTalk Jan 15th, 2006
Emob Jan 9th, 2006

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