I have been away travelling this week visiting the small company I work for in Breda, NL. I know I won’t get as much done this week, not just because of the lost travelling hours, but we have a company meeting which will use up one day, and I never get as much done with the distractions around me in an office. I work best when there is no noise, even with Schubert, Liszt or some other composer paused on the CD player.

The 14th YouTube video was published early, and I started preparing the 1st of a new series or playlist. I set the YouTube video to private and gave one of the team access and she watched the video through. This was a test to see if private YouTube videos still contributed to your watch hour statistics, they do. A couple of days later the 15 minutes of watch time appeared and the video was rescheduled to be made public on the Friday.

The video and podcast currently take up 3 days leaving me in theory 2 days to do something else. Of course, out of those 2 additional days I still need to write additional articles, I might have other tasks, I might attend a conference as I will do next week, and any holidays or public holidays will also reduce the net days I have spare.

I had a meeting with the management team, and it was agreed that we will pursue a path of creating training videos around helping Maximo consultants recertify for their functional exam that I was involved in writing. This would be videos for which there would be a fee. The existing podcast and YouTube videos also support this goal which made me wonder how I might create other material that could demand a fee. And so, for the next two nights I was lying in bed in the middle of the night formulating some ideas.

I concluded that the new course would be quiz based. A video would be created on a particular subject with perhaps 5 questions. A question would be asked with multiple choice answers, then after 15-20 seconds the correct answer would be given. I would then show in the Maximo system how the answer was derived and explain why the other choices were not quite the right answer and how to eliminate the obvious distractors. The video would then start with question two. The course would be coaching a subscriber how to get through the certification. Now that I have finished the Asset Management series of videos, I can use this to experiment with my idea.

I do aim for the level of questions to be harder than they will be in the actual certification. All students must feel that they have learnt a lot from the course, not just enough to get to the pass mark, but enough to achieve a high grade. I also won’t be constrained by the certification objectives but will cover other functional areas so that the course will still be relevant in 5 years or more, even if the questions change. Two years ago, I did nine weekly quizzes of 10 questions each and I had good feedback from this. The title of these quizzes was ‘How well do you know Maximo?’ and I think I may stick with that title.

I will need to start using a Learning Management System (LMS) and my gut feel says that I should include this as a subscriber part of the overall Maximo Secrets website, i.e., keep all the content together. This should boost the site from a search engine perspective, it would also allow the same method of embedding YouTube videos in a Post which will increase the number of Watch Hours on YouTube.

My manager suggests using Udemy, a learning management platform, one of many. Some of the technical consultants have been doing a course there recently. There are some Maximo courses on Udemy already, but they have very few subscribers and they don’t charge much for their courses. It might be a platform where you may soon be competing to appear on the first page if someone was doing a search, especially if the search was ordered by price. My other thought was why pay another platform to host my course when I can do that on WordPress. Also, if I wanted to place the course on another platform, then LinkedIn Learning seems a better bet, it only accepts quality content from what I can see. I wouldn’t want to put a course on a LMS platform where there would be competition, not that I fear any competition, but it does lead the would-be subscriber to compare one against another, perhaps creating a race to the bottom.

In the next few weeks, I’ll have to discuss progress and why I think an LMS in my website is the path to take, so I need to have some convincing arguments. My manager considers WordPress as a blogging platform, and not a Learning Management System. It may have been this some time ago, but I know it is far more than this now and the WordPress Courses are being run from WordPress, not another platform. He also says that you don’t want to get into issues over payments, Udemy will sort this all out and can handle payments on any currency. This might be an issue going down the WordPress route, but to start with I would only offer the course in a few currencies and while I am sure WooCommerce can handle this, it does make each plugin something else that I would have to figure out. It may be harder to set this all up on WordPress, but I believe the result would be better. Besides I could choose to start on WordPress, create the content, and then publish the course on multiple other LMS platforms.

Another advantage I would gain if the new course was part of my Maximo Secrets website is that I would be building a subscriber base that I could communicate with by email. I can’t do this on LinkedIn, and I can’t do this on YouTube, and I suspect that I wouldn’t be able to do this on Udemy either. There is also an opportunity to create a community from the subscribers in a similar manner as we see on WordPress Courses. I wouldn’t want to create a community from people who were not paying a fee. Building the courses into my own website feels as if it will give me more flexibility.

It was a good week for the WordPress statistics last week. Maximo Secrets gained over 7K views and 2K visitors, this was the first time I had achieved both targets in the same week. The second time that each weekday exceeded 1100 views.

On the way back from The Netherlands on Eurostar, the train that crosses the channel between France and UK, I tried to pick out the next music track for the next series of videos. It will be a track from the group called TrackTribe but there were several contenders and what I need to decide is whether I stick with the same genre, Jazz, or go with something completely different, I think the later. It not only needs to have a good beginning and end, but a riff of 7-10 seconds that I can use for section breaks in the video.

Next week will be tough, I will lose one and a half days with a conference and a networking event, then half a day getting home to where my green screen is and I need to try and achieve two videos and podcast episodes, as I am on holiday the following week, I don’t think I will make it. I hope there will be some sunshine as I won’t order any lighting until I have returned. What I do need to decide is whether I just go for it on the use of PowerDirector 365 and the Lavalier microphone which would almost certainly mean I only get the one video completed.

The objectives for week 41 will be:

• Publish the first video and podcast episode on the new series Maintenance Planning using both PowerDirector 365 and the Lavalier microphone. This will require me to settle on the new music track.
• Investigate FSE themes and try switching to one to see if there are problems with the submenu text colouring and featured images, issues I found with the Russell theme.
• Create and publish a post using what I learned from the SEO course. I’ve got one that was 90% complete.
• Start creating a static home page for the Maximo Secrets website.