What is the Open Education Project?
The Open Education Project is the latest evolutions of Wealthy Affiliate. When Wealthy Affiliate was first started by Carson and Kyle in 2005 it was a keyword list site. It was simply a site where people could go to purchase keyword lists for different niches. They would get keyword lists every month for free as long as they were a member.
Over the years Wealthy Affiliate slowly evolved into the internet marketing training site that it is today. The Open Education Project was pretty much a total overhaul of the site. Kyle and Carson completely changed the way training was conducted and how people communicated on the site.
Communication Before and after The Open Education Project
Before the Open Education Project the primary way people communicated with each other was through the use of the forum. If you had a question to ask you would post it in the forum and people would answer it. People would also make informative posts.
After the Open Education Project was implemented the primary way people communicate is through the live chat feature and the blogs. The forum is still there for you to use, but the live chat makes it extremely easy to communicate with people in real time to solve a problem you are having.
Another shift I have noticed since the overhaul is the use of blogs. People used blogs before, but with the new design of wealthy affiliate it makes it a lot easier to follow and comment on blogs.
After you login to wealthy affiliate you come to your “dashboard”. In the center of the screen is a “news feed” similar to what facebook has where you can see “global activity”, “personal feed”, or “notifications”. Global activity is just a feed from what is happening in recent affiliate as it happens. In the personal feed news stream you get notifications from people you are following whenever they create a blog post or create training. Notifications let’s you know when someone has commented on your blog post or replied to one of your comments.
On the very right hand side you’ll see the live chat. Here you can follow along with it and post comments. If you like you can click on the full view button and it will pop out into it’s own window.
Other Features
The other features of Wealthy Affiliate have remained pretty much the same. There is still
- WordPress express: allows you to install a wordpress blog onto a domain within minutes
- keyword tool: allows you to find low competition, high search volume keywords for article marketing and PPC.
- WAbinars: A place to find information on future webinars, as well as view past webinar recordings.
- Training: You can access training that other members have created. You can also request training to be made.
Overall, I think Kyle and Carson have made it much easier to navigate Wealthy Affiliate with the Open Education Project. I think it lives up to the word “open” in many different ways. It has definitely “opened” the lines of communication within wealthy affiliate making it easier to communicate with other members. As a result, people are finding answers to their questions faster, getting feedback about their websites faster, learning faster.
Do you have any questions or comments? Leave them below and I’ll be sure to answer them… 🙂