Wimba :: Products : Wimba Classroom

Humanize your Online Course: Add a Live Virtual Classroom!

Teach and meet live online. Our fully featured live virtual classrooms support audio, video, application sharing, and content display, enabling instructors to add vitally important elements of interaction that simply cannot be provided in a text-based course. Personalize your online courses by holding live, online classes, office hours, guest lectures, webcasts, and meetings.

Instructors consider personal interaction to be the most valuable element of the teaching and learning process. Wimba Classroom allows faculty and students to build relationships by combining state-of-the-art interactive technologies such as voice, video, application sharing, polling, and whiteboarding, with traditional best practices of instruction. Now, enjoy the best elements of face-to-face and online instruction as faculty and students can talk to each other, express emotion, and feel as if they're part of a single community.

Read about Wimba Classroom 5.0 with Multi-Way and Follow-the-Speaker Video! (.pdf)

Sign up for a Wimba Classroom demo

New Wimba Classroom 5.0 features:
-Multi-way and Follow-the-speaker video
-Enhanced breakout rooms
-Emoticons
-Phone conferencing

>> Benefits
>> Features
>> Product Comparison

Benefits

Reduce Senses of Isolation and Create Community
Allow remote students to feel closer to their classmates while creating a sense of community among students and instructors who might not otherwise interact with one another.

Offer Anytime Access
Offer live classes, office hours, and group discussions at times that are convenient for instructors and students, not just when the physical facilities are available.

Ensure Comprehension
Ensure your students understand their lessons by asking for immediate feedback, answering questions, and giving in-depth verbal explanations of complex material.

Appeal to Different Learning Styles
Enable students to meet their developmental objectives by appealing to different learning styles, as many students are auditory and visual learners.

Have Fun
Have fun: The best instructors and most memorable lectures invariably mix elements of education and entertainment ? seeing, talking, laughing, and joking are all parts of the education process.

Integrate with other Educational Technologies
Seamlessly integrate within Blackboard and WebCT ? no new interfaces to configure or commands to learn

Features & Functionality

Multi-way audio and video
Create lively, personal instruction and conversation with real-time multi-way voice and video, as instructors and students communicate just as if they were in a face-to-face class. Voice-detected switching allows users to automatically see who's speaking, thereby allowing each class to focus on the teaching and learning, not the technology. Wimba Classroom even offers a telephone dial-in feature that allows users to participate when traveling, and even acts as a back-up if network problems occur.

Public & private text chat
Some students are more comfortable writing than speaking, and our chat messaging allows the shy student to communicate textually so they can participate with their more talkative classmates.

Flexible content area
A math class teaches very different information than an engineering or history class, so we give you a great deal of freedom to present the material you need. Show content such as PowerPoint, Word, Excel, HTML, webpages, images, movie clips, PDF, Flash, CMS pages, and more.

Electronic whiteboard and polls, quizzes, and surveys
A best practice of live instruction is to regularly offer interactive exercises. By offering whiteboard exercises and asking polling questions, your students will remain highly engaged.

Application sharing
Create collaborative exercises or teach complicated software applications just as if your students were seated right next to you. Application sharing allows you to work on any application, as everyone logged-in will follow every action your cursor makes. You can even pass control so students can collaborate right along with you.

Archivable presentations
Wouldn't it be great if you could study for an exam by going back in time to the original class? Now you can, as archives retain everything that happened — from voice, to chat, to content — during the live class, allowing all classes to be played back, verbatim.

Technology appropriate for Online Education
Student hardware, software, networks, and IT skills vary enormously. In order to accommodate as many students as possible, we specifically develop Wimba Classroom to effectively operate in the most challenging user environments. Our thin-client, low-bandwidth features allow for dial-up access, and our cross-platform support and intuitive user interface allow for virtually any user, on a PC, Mac, or Linux machine, to fully participate with minimal instruction and setup.

Accessible to people with disabilities
Just because a student has a disability doesn't mean he or she shouldn't be able to attend your live, online class. Live and archived classes can be closed-captioning for the hearing impaired while also reaching out to the visually impaired by offering numerous keyboard shortcut keys, hot keys, and compatibility with most screen readers. These accessibility features help institutions meet many state and federal accessibility guidelines.

Integrated "Help"
Display contextual help information or contact Wimba technical support.

Product Comparison

Features & Benefits	Single Room	Multiple Rooms
Full classroom functionality	X	X
Easy to maintain and access	X	X
Unlimited classes for an individual instructor or department	X	X
ASP hosting	X	X
A great way to introduce a live classroom to your organization	X	X
Customizable interface for personalization		X
Unlimited classes for scheduling flexibility		X
Unlimited students and faculty		X
Robust administration tools		X
Compatible with course management systems		X
On site hosting, plug-in play		X
Perfect for institution-wide deployment		X

Participant Requirements

Windows 2000+, Mac OSX 10.2+ or Linux*
128 MB RAM (256 MB recommended)
IE 5.0+, Netscape 7.0+, Mozilla 1.0+, Safari 1.1+ (Browser must be Java and JavaScript enabled)
Internet access at 56k or above

Presenter Requirements

Windows 2000+, Mac OSX 10.2+ or Linux*
256 MB RAM (higher recommended)
IE 5.0+, Netscape 7.0+, Mozilla 1.0+, Safari 1.1+ (Browser must be Java and JavaScript enabled)
Internet access at 56k or above (Broadband strongly recommended)

Wimba Classroom is offered as either an annual or perpetual license and is deployed as either an outsourced ASP (we host the server for you) or standalone basis (the server resides on your network).

Annual, hosted pricing options. Inquire within about other currencies.