I am very excited to announce a new release of our Podclass Facebook application! We’ve been listening to your feedback and we’ve implemented MANY improvements to the application!

Some of the changes we’ve implemented include:

• Highlighting of Recently Popular, Most Popular and Recently Added courses under the Learn tab.
• Featuring Courses Taught By Friends and Courses Learned By Friends under the Friends’ Courses tab.
• Improved layouts on course description pages.
• Much more intuitive user-flow.
• The ability to automatically enroll people into courses by providing them a direct URL access.
• Notifications sent to enrolled students of courses when new content is added or forum posts are made to their courses.

With these latest changes, courses in Podclass that have an introduction video or image will get MUCH more exposure than those that do not. So if you have a course in Podclass, I encourage you to make sure you have a video introduction or at least an image in your course description to maximize your exposure in Facebook.

In the next few weeks, we’ll be releasing even more exciting improvements to our Facebook app along with a series of screencast videos to show how to teach and promote your online classes in Facebook.

In the mean time, I’d love to hear your feedback of our latest Facebook app. If there are any features that you would like to see that are not there yet, please let me know. If there is anything in application that is confusing – anything at all – I want to hear about it. I thank everyone who has taken the time to give us constructive feedback on ways we can improve our app.

You can check out the newest release of our Podclass Facebook app by clicking here.

Today we are excited to announce the release of Podclass Web Services (PWS), a set of APIs that enable colleges, universities and companies who use online learning management systems to offer their students and instructors access to their courses from within Facebook using the Podclass app.

As of today, PWS works with the learning management system Moodle, which is the largest open-source learning management system used by over 40,000 colleges, universities and companies worldwide. Podclass will be extending PWS to support other learning management systems in the future.

Our developers have been working very hard for on PWS for several months and we are very excited to formally launch this service.

With the launch of PWS, the implications are extraordinary for any learning institution whose students use Facebook. Now any student from a college or university that uses Moodle can now access and manage their course content, connect and collaborate with classmates from inside of Facebook.

Podclass hopes to transform the face of education by enabling students and teachers to access their online courses from ANY social network they want. Currently, Podclass works within Facebook, but we plan to port our Podclass application to work with all of the Google OpenSocial social networks as well, including MySpace, Hi5, Bebo, Friendster, Linkedin, Plaxo and others.

I am proud to announce that Podclass is the recipient of the fbFund grant from Facebook! Our Facebook application Podclass is one of 10 companies chosen as a recipient out of about 1,000 applicants. We are among the first group of companies to receive the fbFund and were featured at Facebook’s f8 held on Wednesday in San Francisco.

Our team has been working very hard to get our Facebook application working with the latest profile changes that Facebook has implemented, as well as improving the application all together.

On Tuesday evening, Facebook had a reception for the fbFund recipients at the Grand Pu Bah and I had the opportunity to meet fellow fbFundees as well as some other nice people from Facebook, Accel Partners and The Founders Fund.

The next day was the f8! Being an fbFund exhibitor was an amazing experience and opportunity for Podclass! Tim Higgs, one of our developers from New Zealand flew out to join me for the f8. Our exhibit booth showed off our new demo video that we’re very proud of as well. We had a universally excellent response from everyone we showed our app to!

Other than Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote and Ben Ling’s presentation, I wasn’t able to attend any of the other sessions because we were manning the booth the entire time.

All of the fbFund recipients had the opportunity to do our “elevator pitch” during the fbFund session moderated by Cat Lee at the end of the conference. Lots of fun!

Tim and I had a great time meeting people, talking about Podclass and hanging out with friends during the after party, where the band Thievery Corporation played.

More to come on the fbFund experience!

We are excited to announce the public beta of the Podclass Facebook application. (We actually launched the application on March 4th, but we’ve spent the last month working out bugs and fine-tuning features)

Just as a user can do at Podclass.com, the Podclass Facebook application enables any Facebook member to teach entire courses (both free and paid) and expose them to their entire network of Facebook friends – without ever having to leave Facebook.

Course listings can even be shared with Facebook friends who don’t have the application installed.

Currently the application has the following features:

• Teach free and paid courses
• Sign up securely for free and paid courses
• Add courses that you are already enrolled in
• View all content, including video, audio and text from within Facebook
• See your friends courses (courses they are taking and teaching)
• See who else is enrolled in Podclass courses
• Post to course discussion boards
• Post to course walls
• Ability to become Gold or Platinum member through using the application.

We are working on even more features that should be in place within the next month or so. Please check it out and give us your feedback!