xTrain.com Combines Quality Training With An Online Community

I had the privilege of taking some online courses at xTrain.com, a new training venture that serves up online tutorials and training videos and competes with the likes of Total Training, Lynda.com and now Kelby Training, just announced recently. The training market for creative professionals is getting more and more crowded, and I know that creative professionals have less time nowadays for training and less dollars for training (companies are investing less and less into building employees’ skills) so it can be a real trick finding success in the market. However, xTrain.com has some things going for it that none of the other major players have, and I think xTrain.com will do very well if it can market itself and get the word out early.

Spectacular presentation

xTrain.com is connected with Splash Media, a media company based out of Dallas that boasts some high-quality video gear, a production studio and very high production values. The training sessions I attended were at least as polished as anything from the other company. The Web site itself is well-designed, signing up is easy, and the videos themselves stream without a problem. It is recommended that you have a high-speed Internet connection, but that goes for any streaming video of this size and duration. All pages have a tag cloud in the corner so you can see available and popular from any page on the Web site.

I have to say something further about the production values of the training videos, because they really are excellent. I attended a few of Russell Preston Brown’s “Photoshop Laboratory” sessions, and the set and costume design looks like something out of Bill Nye the Science Guy. You can debate all you want whether or not Brown should be dressed and act like a mad scientist, but when a training video has the same production values as a television show then it must be something special. Other videos are shot on a sharp soundstage and the sound itself is also clear and crisp.

xTrain actually feels like coursework

Some training experiences end up feeling like instructor demonstrations or warmed-over information from the instructor’s latest book or DVD. The cool thing about online training is that the educational experience doesn’t have to be lost, and xTrain has some fresh ideas that help preserve it:

• Course resources, such as handouts, links and books that help you continue learning after the course has been taught
• Exercises that present a challenge to students and allow uploading of the result to the Web site to share with other attendees
• Quizzes and tests that require you to demonstrate your absorption of the information
• Course certificates that are e-mailed to you upon completing a course and passing the final test. These certificates are also stored with your xTrain profile (more on this later).

Most courses have exercises and some resources, but some are more thorough than others. And in the past, not all courses offered tests or course certificates, but xTrain has been working on filling in the gaps and every course should have a test by the time you read this. Another little glitch is the fact that tests can be taken over and over and don’t know when users are using the browser’s “back” button so it’s possible to take a test over and over until you get enough answers right. According to my contact, xTrain is working hard to secure tests and exercise files for every course, and they are also preparing to announce more classes and faculty. Landing some elite instructors and industry figures as faculty will make xTrain a major player in the field.

I took a couple full-length courses (some courses have several sessions) and passed their tests, gaining my course certificates. It’s funny because I didn’t think I would really care about earning those certificates since they’re generated on the fly by the Web site and there’s no printed parchment, but there really was a sense of accomplishment that came with going through all the material, passing the test and earning the certificate. I felt like I accomplished more on xTrain.com than I did at Photoshop World or when listening to my various training DVDs.

The faculty are among some of the best

A training company is only as good as its instructors, and it can be hard to find great ones. Many of the great ones are exclusive to a particular company, such as Deke McClelland with Lynda.com. xTrain.com does not yet have the stable of instructors that the other companies have, but it already has several great names among its faculty of 20:

• Ben Willmore
• Russell Preston Brown
• Rick Sammon
• Rob Sheppard
• Taz Tally

I am particularly glad to see Rob Sheppard on this list because I admire him as a writer (see my reviews of his books here) and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him as an instructor. He has 12 courses offered on xTrain, and they are among the best on the entire site, with extensive chapters, resources and tests that really test your skills. On the other hand, Photoshop World instructor Jack Davis is listed as a faculty member but he has no courses listed to his credit. Some of the other instructors are not well-known in the industry, but I didn’t come across a bad course so they all have their skills. Bryan Peterson is one instructor in particular who was new to me but was very knowledgeable and fun to learn from.

Note that I’m using the term “instructors” and “faculty” at different times in this section. In keeping with xTrain’s emphasis on the learning experience, they call their group of instructors “faculty.” I love the distinction, as it sets them apart from the other training businesses.

Photoshop World + MySpace.com = xTrain.com

The real killer feature on xTrain.com is its online community of learners (note the use of “learners” rather than “users,” another example of the educational emphasis). Once you have created your profile you can include your biography, goals, portfolio and also show the results of your exercises for certain classes. Any certificates you have earned will also show up in your profile. If you find a learner who you like, you can make him/her your friend and start racking up the friends just like on MySpace. There’s now over 10,000 profiles on xTrain.com so there’s plenty of creative professionals to network and learn with.

At first I wasn’t sure how xTrain would find its niche in the training community, but I think this online community will be the thing that does it. No other training experience that I know of offers the kind of personal networking that xTrain offers (well, as “personal” as you can get on the Internet). There’s a lot more xTrain could do with it too, such as creating forums so learners can socialize and discuss topics outside of the coursework. A model for this type of social interaction would be online user groups: they used to be a very popular way to discuss industry topics and get to know people online, but I think they spiraled downward once spam infiltrated the system. The “social community” model that MySpace, Facebook and other Web sites have popularized can be fully applied to xTrain for a unique training experience.

Conclusion

xTrain.com is fun, entertaining, illuminating and has a great future ahead of it. It is also a young Web site with a faculty of 20 (some experienced, some not) and it doesn’t have a live training business to fall back on like other companies do, and it has only just begun offering DVDs. In any case, xTrain has a real opportunity to be a leading training provider if it continues its high production values and fully leverages its learning community to the fullest. A subscription is $25 per month ($20 if you subscribe in December) and you get out of it what you put into it.