Some of the changes just had to be made given the success of the Verification Academy.\u00a0 When it started a few years back, Harry Foster (the face in the picture of the Verification Academy website above) knew the adoption of advanced technology was hampered by unequal and slow distribution of knowledge.\u00a0 Part of the Verification Academy\u2019s thrust was to bring information about advanced verification topics to the whole world in a format that could be easily used.\u00a0 The content comes from respected verification subject matter experts and the first \u201crunaway success\u201d was the Open Verification Methodology (OVM) training by John Aynsley from Doulos for the \u201cbasic\u201d module and Tom Fitzpatrick from Mentor Graphics for the \u201cadvanced\u201d module.\u00a0 The Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) course, likewise, has also joined the ranks of the highly watched.\u00a0 Updates to the Academy improve the services to deliver video.<\/p>\n We have moved to the most current web video protocols that allow modern browsers and mobile devices to easily access course content. You can watch courses on the \u201csmaller\u201d smartphone screens to the largest of TV displays with SD and HD video to support your viewing preferences. Since content is delivered in native web technologies, users do not have to depend on Flash or other plugins.<\/p>\n We have also migrated the Academy to the leading open source content management system and adopted the use SSL throughout the Verification Academy to make it more secure.<\/p>\n When we first started the Verification Academy, we did not know how large the community would grow nor could we predict the demands the community would place on the resources to support it.\u00a0 Today, there are almost 12.5K users making it the largest single site to support the verification professional.\u00a0 The changes we have made to the internals of the site show a speed improvement of over 400% by exploiting a commercial content delivery network to handle large media.<\/p>\n We have also made big improvements to searches.\u00a0 The searching facility now scans across all content at once, from the forums, to the UVM\/OVM Cookbook<\/a> and presents the information to you in an improved way to allow you to filter the results to focus on just that you want to know.<\/p>\n![\"VA](\"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/54\/2012\/10\/VA-2.png\")
<\/a>The Verification Academy team at Mentor Graphics has been working hard as well to restyle the Verification Academy<\/a> website, modernize it and make content easily accessible. It made its debut in late September, a few weeks before the Portland Fashion Show.\u00a0 While these two things are a coincidence, the focus on a refreshed style should not to be totally unexpected.<\/p>\n![\"UVM](\"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/54\/2012\/10\/UVM-Basic-Intro-CC.png\")
<\/a>And for many members, where English is a second language, the video captions, when offered, are in plain text.\u00a0 Registered users can click on the picture to the right to see the UVM Introduction and enable closed caption to see how the text appears right below the video.\u00a0 (Or, from reading the text below video in the picture to the right, you can see John is introducing himself at the moment of this screen capture.)<\/p>\n