On Wednesday, October 1st, we went live with www.connected.info and began the process of registering the users at our first pilot site. Our partner is the Center for Advanced Research and Technology (www.cart.org). CART is great high school located in Clovis, CA. They are a joint venture of the Clovis and Fresno Unified school districts. We had seven teachers and 615 students to register, along with their parents.
We opted to be on-site and present the goals of the pilot to the teachers and the students in the hope that this would encourage them to be more interactive on the site. The interesting thing for us is that the teachers are planning to use the capabilities of the site to post assignments and give the kids information on their assignments. In addition, the kids can create their own project teams.
So, the students rushed to register themselves. And, we ran into our first glitch. It seems the Google and Yahoo, which by far have the largest number of students using their email services, treated our registration confirmation email as coming from a mail relay and rejected the mail. Actually, now more than a week later, we are still struggling with this issue.
However, as of today, we are starting to see really good usage of the site and the capabilities of the product even though we have not started the phase of the product pilot where we ask users to do anything. Some things are very encouraging. We are seeing an average of 19 page views / visit and the average visit time is 10 minutes. The visit time has actually gone up over the past week, which is a really nice sign.
So, I would think Phase 1, the setup and registration phase should be considered a success so far.
