The Rich Media Institute (an FITC partner company) is very pleased to announce the launch of the new General Forums.

I included some detail about this launch here, in my inaugural posting. But I wanted to include a few additional notes here.

The RMI, which is now over four years old, has continued to mature, and now, in addition to our physical facilities in Los Angeles and Toronto, where we host the majority of our live workshops, we've established a respectable selection of on-demand titles in our online training catalog.

Because of the addition of a new type of training to our business, the needs of our website have also shifted over time. And we've attempted to keep pace, having built, modified and maintained two versions of our site of the past few years.

Now, we are in the process of rolling out the 3rd version of our site. Unlike with the previous two versions of the RMI site, this one will be released over time, with new features scheduled for release throughout 2010. These forums are just the first minor feature release, with more significant enhancements to come shortly after the holidays.

The RMI has traditionally maintained forums with all of our on-demand courses (though, those are temporarily disabled during this transition), specifically for the use of students to ask questions of their instructors in our asynchronous, online training environment.

These new forums are intended for a different purpose. Instead of supporting the learning process of students already enrolled in courses, these new forums are intended to foster more of an active sense of community around our website.

Anyone who has attended our live workshops in Los Angeles or Toronto knows that the RMI strives to provide a unique experience -- not just in the topics we select, but also in the comfortable (and somewhat unusual) environments we create to bring you those topics. The forums, while representing a minor feature in the scheme of RMI V3, are an important step in helping us create the kind of environment around our website, that we like to create in our physical facilities.

We've chosen a few specific forums to start with, and we've chosen them to coincide both with the focus of our online training catalog, and also with the expertise of some of our resident faculty members who will be kind enough to monitor these forums on an on-going basis. So if you have any questions on Adobe Flash, Flex or ActionScript, working with PureMVC, or business practices, please feel free to head on over to the new RMI forums and we'll do our best to help you out.

Share and enjoy!

-r