Wimba BlogBlog:2011-03-10T15:31:38ZCopyright (c) 2011, mwasowskiExpressionEnginetag:wimba.com,2011:03:10Call For Presentations deadline for Bb Collaborate user conference is tomorrow Friday March 11tag:wimba.com,2011:community/blog/1.12692011-03-10T14:28:38Z2011-03-10T15:31:38Zmwasowskimwasowski@wimba.comhttp://www.wimba.comDearest Blackboard Collaborate Customers (and anyone kicking the tires), This is just a quick reminder that the deadline for the Call For Presentations for our user conference is tomorrow, Friday March 11, 2011. We’ve already received a number of terrific submissions about everything from adoption tips, best practices, effective instructional design, and ROI of collaboration, but I look forward to receiving many more in the next 37.5 hours!
]]>Blackboard Collaborate Updatetag:wimba.com,2011:community/blog/1.12682011-03-09T15:30:37Z2011-03-09T16:34:37Zmwasowskimwasowski@wimba.comhttp://www.wimba.comTo read the original blog entry by Maurice Heiblum on blackboard.com, click here
Hi all,
It’s been 3 months since I last blogged and a little over 6 months since the merger – I can’t believe it. Time has flown by! In that time we have been busy merging two competitors into Blackboard and executing on the priorities I outlined after the merger:
* Customer experience – Ensuring that our customers continue to have the exceptional client experience that Elluminate and Wimba have always provided. * United team – Bringing Elluminate, Wimba and Blackboard teams together into a single, cohesive unit so we can carry that high standard of client care forward. * Product Roadmap – Creating a vision for how our collective solutions come together to help you better engage students to improve outcomes and save time while trimming cost.
Let me share a few recent developments:
Customer Experience.
It is very important to me that our customers continue to have a positive experience with our products and our company. As we evolve the integration of our business, we do so while helping to ensure that our customer experience is not negatively impacted; rather we hope that the integration enhances customers’ experiences. Organizationally, we have integrated our support, hosting and services organizations to streamline the delivery of service to our customers. We continue every day to examine every process that touches our customers, while looking for ways to improve.
The results so far are encouraging. Our customer satisfaction ratings are high, customers are renewing our products at a fast rate, and we have greatly grown the business for both product lines in the months since the merger
In addition to ensuring a positive customer experience, it is important for us to partner with our customers as we develop solutions to meet their needs. To that end, we have created a combined Product Advisory Council (PAC). Both Wimba and Elluminate had very strong and open partnerships with customers to get continual feedback about products and services. We launched our combined PAC in December and have been having meetings with about 80 of our closest customers every two weeks.
In addition, we announced our user conference, “Connections Summit 2011”. Our goal for this event is to build upon the success of the Wimba user conference from years past to provide you with a forum for networking and idea sharing. I am personally excited to hear how our customers are using Blackboard Collaborate to achieve their institutional goals and I am looking forward to attending many sessions. The deadline to submit proposals is March 11th so submit today via Connections. For inspiration, check out some archived presentations from 2010 here.
New Team
When I last blogged, I was still not completely comfortable saying “Maurice from Blackboard Collaborate.” Now, it feels natural. Our team has really come together as one organization. The first indication of our unification occurred when members of the team, regardless of whether they came from Blackboard, Elluminate or Wimba, joined together to make fun of my pastel colored shirts! J
I am so proud of our team. They found common ground and have been executing to perfection since the merger. Combining the three entities – Blackboard, Elluminate and Wimba resulted in a team with the most extensive knowledge about educational needs and how we can meet those needs through collaborative technologies.
Product Roadmap
At Educause, we announced Project Gemini (http://www.blackboard.com/sites/collaborate/index.html), which will bring together the best of Elluminate and Wimba. Our development teams have been hard at work and so has the Product Advisory Council. The feedback we have received has been extremely positive and we are on schedule for a mid-year delivery. I’d like to thank our customers for their time and input; together we are transforming education with new ways to collaborate and learn.
Looking ahead, I am excited to share the details around Project Gemini and all the other facets of our business. Other Blackboard Collaborate team members, as well as some customers, will join me on this blog to give you a flavor of how we’ve gone about building Project Gemini.
So, lots more to come in the months ahead. Stay tuned and as always reach out to me if you have any feedback at Maurice.heiblum@blackboard.com.
Statements regarding our product development initiatives, including new products and future product upgrades, updates or enhancements represent our current intentions, but may be modified, delayed or abandoned without prior notice and there is no assurance that such offering, upgrades, updates or functionality will become available unless and until they have been made generally available to our customers
]]>We’ve Opened the Call for Presentations for Blackboard Collaborate Connections Summit 2011tag:wimba.com,2011:community/blog/1.12562011-01-21T16:12:59Z2011-01-21T17:25:59Zmwasowskimwasowski@wimba.comhttp://www.wimba.comHello and Happy New Year!
I’ve sure most of you have heard already, but in case you haven’t, yesterday we opened the Call for Presentations for our first annual Blackboard Collaborate Connections Summit 2011! The submission deadline is March 11, 2011.
This will be a terrific way to put your institution in the spotlight by sharing your experience, expertise, and examples at the 2011 Blackboard Collaborate Connections Summit, our first-ever combined Wimba and Elluminate user conference. Customers representing all academic disciplines and departments are welcome to submit proposals for concurrent session presentations.
Some potential presentation topics could include: * Comprehensive use of Blackboard Collaborate for instruction, help, and meetings * Adoption, implementation, and faculty training * Newest uses of Elluminate Live!® V10, Wimba Classroom™ V6.1, Wimba Pronto™, and Wimba Voice™ * Lecture capture via MP4, MP3, high-resolution archives, and more * Non-instructional uses of Blackboard Collaborate * Best practices and/or tips and tricks * Lessons learned * Effective instructional and/or curriculum design
*And I do have to add that the program committee probably won’t be able to accept every presentation proposals, but I hope you all throw your hats into the ring!
Matt
]]>An Offer From Blackboard Collaboratetag:wimba.com,2011:community/blog/1.12432011-01-08T21:38:53Z2011-01-09T01:02:53Zmwasowskimwasowski@wimba.comhttp://www.wimba.comThe acquisition of DimDim this week has set off lots of talk about the importance of Web conferencing and collaboration tools. Salesforce.com will use DimDim’s technology to enhance their Chatter platform. However, DimDim’s current customers will see their access to the service end starting on March 15, 2011.
For educational institutions who had built their courses and business workflows around realtime collaboration using DimDim, this might cause some disruption and Blackboard would like to help. For those who’ve been using Elluminate and Wimba for a while, you know that we are dedicated to meeting the needs of educators by providing stable solutions that are supported by a clear roadmap and a dedicated team for development.
For those customers who want to make the transition before their annual contract ends, Blackboard will credit the cost of any unused portion of a pre-paid DimDim contract towards the purchase of Blackboard Collaborate solutions (up to a maximum of $10,000). Please email BbCollaborateInsideSales@blackboard.com to get the details around this offer. For monthly subscription customers, Elluminate vOfifce s an affordable and full featured offering. For free DimDim customers, please take a look at Elluminate vRoom.
For more on Blackboard Collaborate, check out our page at: www.blackboard.com/collaborate and Elluminate’s recent coverage in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Web Conferencing.
]]>2010 Global Education Conferencetag:wimba.com,2010:community/blog/1.12392010-11-12T01:21:04Z2010-11-12T02:25:04Zmwasowskimwasowski@wimba.comhttp://www.wimba.com2010 Global Education Conference November 15-19 Totally Free. Completely Online.
What if we held a virtual conference on global education? What if we could impact education on a scale never tried before? What if we made it easily accessible and freely available for educators all over the world to attend? What if we focused on encouraging not just attendance, but participation…
Fast forward to almost a year later, and their vision has become a reality. The ground-breaking 2010 Global Education Conference kicks off on November 15th for 5 days, providing unprecedented opportunities for connecting education activities and initiatives worldwide. A strictly volunteer effort, the conference quickly garnered incredible worldwide support, with almost 95 partner organizations, over 120 global educator advisors, 50+ keynote addresses, and more than 350 sessions about globally connecting students and educators.
“We’ve been blown away by the response,” says Steve Hargadon. “It’s been like building an airplane while flying it, and we’ve accomplished so much with so few resources. It immediately became clear that this conference will be the first of many. Global education will be one of the great EDU themes of the next ten years.”
“We want to re-inspire teachers, helping them to be more motivated about helping students,” adds Lucy Gray. “Today, there’s really no excuse for teachers not to use technology to connect students across borders to develop a global perspective. It’s the right idea at the right time.”
Multiple time zones. Multiple languages. Multiple tracks.
The conference will be held online via Elluminate technology. Sessions will be free, broadcast live in multiple time zones and multiple languages, and available in recorded formats afterwards. Presentations are organized in six categories: Teacher, Student, Curriculum, Policy and Leadership, Global Issues, and Learning 2.0. Here are just a few highlights.
• “Connecting Modern Language Classes Around the Globe” with Andrea Reinsmoen, American School of Bombay (India) • “Mastering the Moment: Reimaging Learning in Times of Economic Crisis” with Keith Krueger, Consortium of School Networking (CoSN) (USA) • “Utilizing Web-based Learning Environment in University Teaching” with Satu Alaoutinen, Lappeenranta University of Technology (Finland) • “Global and Multicultural Citizenship” with Gary Shaw, Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (Australia) • “Exploring the Informal Future of Higher Education” with Philipp Schmidt, Peer 2 Peer University (South Africa) To see complete listings of all the keynotes and track presentations, visit the conference site today at www.globaleducationconference.com. And be sure to tell others about this first-ever conference. Don’t miss being a part of global education history!
]]>The road aheadtag:wimba.com,2010:community/blog/1.12302010-10-13T13:21:28Z2010-10-13T14:38:28Zmwasowskimwasowski@wimba.comhttp://www.wimba.com Dear Elluminate and Wimba Communities,
When Wimba and Elluminate joined Blackboard in July, we committed that we’d share our vision for the road ahead at EDUCAUSE. We want to be as transparent as possible about our product strategy, which was informed by input from many customers we’ve listened to in recent months. As our companies come together, they’ve asked us to focus on three principles:
• Support the products we have now and allow us ample time for change management, if and when needed. • Focus resources on delivering easy-to-deploy, easy-to-use, educationally-focused products that bring needed innovations and enhancements. • Support openness and integrations with other technology platforms.
We’ve taken these mandates to heart, and I believe we’ve honored all of them in our go-forward strategy. Here’s our roadmap for the road ahead:
Instant Collaboration We have two solutions that let you see the presence status of others you want to collaborate with and easily start a collaboration session if they’re available: Wimba Pronto and Elluminate VCS. They will both be supported through the end of 2011. At that point, Wimba Pronto will be our go-forward core product. Pronto provides a native MacOS-supported client, advances in accessibility, CMS integrations, and the ability to deploy in a SaaS model, and we’re excited to continue development of this robust solution. This week, we announced availability of the Universal Integration for Wimba Pronto to many other CMS/LMS/SIS products, reinforcing our commitment to openness across our product sets.
Anytime Collaboration and Content Creation All of our products in this category, including Wimba Voice, Wimba Create, Elluminate Plan!, Elluminate Publish! and LearnCentral, will continue to be sold and serviced as they are today.
Scheduled Collaboration Wimba Classroom and Elluminate Live! are our two main products for Web conferencing sessions for meetings, events, virtual classrooms and other uses. Both have many users and deep functionality sets but investing in both over the long term would prevent us from focusing resources on innovations our customers want. So we will invest in a single platform, based on the foundational architecture of Elluminate Live!, that incorporates core features from both systems, user interface enhancements planned as part of the Wimba LiveX project, and new innovations not found in either solution today.
Dubbed “Project Gemini,” this effort will be managed in a way that limits any disruption to the current work you’re doing and provides ample time and flexible options for any future transitions. We will support, maintain and host the current versions of Wimba Classroom through January 2014 and host Wimba Classroom archives through August 2015. We will also support, maintain and host the current version of Elluminate Live! until 2012. When the new platform is ready, we’ll provide parallel access to releases to help build familiarity and to ease transitions.
We’re sharing this news here on the blog and in person at EDUCAUSE this week. More detail on our plans can be found at our Web site and in a series of Webinars we’ll be hosting next week.
I hope you are as excited about our plans as I am. By combining the resources of Elluminate and Wimba, we are able to create efficiencies to better position us for innovation over the long-term. Project Gemini is our first example, which along with Wimba Pronto, will form the key pillars of our new collaboration platform. One that will allow us to innovate faster and farther in the next decade and to better realize the promise of collaboration technology to support teachers and learners. I hope we can count on your support in the journey ahead, and thank you for your continued partnership to date.
Maurice Heiblum, President Blackboard Collaborate
Statements regarding our product development initiatives, including new products and future product upgrades, updates or enhancements represent our current intentions, but may be modified, delayed or abandoned without prior notice and there is no assurance that such offering, upgrades, updates or functionality will become available unless and until they have been made generally available to our customers.
]]>Meet us at EDUCAUSE 2010tag:wimba.com,2010:community/blog/1.12272010-10-08T17:03:32Z2010-10-08T18:05:32Zmwasowskimwasowski@wimba.comhttp://www.wimba.com Elluminate/Wimba Booth #1101
Stop by for one or more of our in-booth sessions to earn how to get the most from your Elluminate and Wimba products. Here’s just a sampling of our featured presentation. Click here for complete schedule. Tuesday, October 12th
* 4:45 – 5:00pm: Keep it Live! with Drexel University
* 6:15 – 6:30pm: Increase Retention Rates and Save Time and Money via Collaboration Technology with University of Utah
Wednesday, October 13th
* 10:05 – 10:25am: Accessibility overview with Valerie Schreiner, Sr. Director, Product Management. Learn how Elluminate/Wimba can help you ensure there’s no user left behind.
* 10:15 – 10:30am: Best Practices for Introducing Wimba Pronto to Faculty and Students with Ivy Tech Community College
* 4:30 – 4:45pm: Growing Collaboration at a Public College with Broward College
There will be Wimba Classroom and Elluminate Live! demos throughout both days. Plus, you could be a winner! Drawings will be held Wednesday at 1pm for an iPad and Thursday at 12:05pm for a GPS. You must be present to win. Special Events – Wednesday, October 13th
Join Blackboard executives at 3:30 – 4:20pm at the Anaheim Convention Center in room 210B for an overview of company future plans, including a report on Blackboard Collaborate.
Who do we appreciate? YOU! Join us at the annual Blackboard Client Appreciation Party at 7:00 – 11:00pm at the House of Blues Anaheim. Attendance is limited. RSVP now.
We look forward to seeing you at EDUCAUSE!
PS. If you miss us at the conference, join us on October 18th at for a webinar review of the Blackboard Collaborate vision and strategy. You’ll be receiving an email invite next week.
]]>Blackboard Collaborate Progress Reporttag:wimba.com,2010:community/blog/1.12212010-08-25T11:48:30Z2010-08-25T13:02:30Zmwasowskimwasowski@wimba.comhttp://www.wimba.comWith the promise of keeping you updated about the progress of Blackboard Collaborate, here is a new statement from Maurice Heiblum, President, Blackboard Collaborate:
To the Elluminate and Wimba Communities,
My name is Maurice Heiblum and I’m the President of Blackboard Collaborate, the new division of Blackboard created by the acquisition of Wimba and Elluminate on July 7. (I’m hoping this isn’t the first that you’ve heard this news, but if it is, please click HERE for more details.)
Since that day, we’ve been hard at work on our three most important goals:
1. Customer experience - Ensuring that you continue to have the great client experience that Elluminate and Wimba have always provided, especially during this back to school time. 2. New team - Bringing Elluminate, Wimba and Blackboard teams together into a single, cohesive unit so we can carry that high standard of client care forward. 3. Roadmap - Creating a vision for how our collective solutions come together to help you better engage students, improve outcomes and save time while trimming cost.
As we make progress on these goals, I want to make sure you receive frequent communications from me and our team. I’ll start today by providing an update on how the teams you interact with most have come together. I’m happy to say that the headline is very consistent with our vision going into this new stage. We thought we could build even stronger teams together than apart, with relatively limited change overall, particularly in the areas closest to delivering you a great customer experience. You’ll ultimately be the judge of whether we were right, but I’m feeling good about our first steps.
Customer Support – The people who supported you before will be the same ones who support you moving forward. Zemina Hasham will lead a combined Wimba and Elluminate support organization that continues unchanged.
Professional Services – Led by Aaron Bond, we stand ready to help you implement our solutions and provide training and certification programs on our products.
Sales and Customer Success - The combined Sales and Customer Success teams will also continue to be led by familiar faces – Paul Roberge, Kristian Photopoulos and Thomas Jepsen. While we have attempted to maintain consistent points of contact, there might be some change in your individual account teams. We’ll inform you of those in email within the next few days.
As excited as we are about the new organization, combining the Wimba and Elluminate teams under the Blackboard umbrella has not been easy. As is inevitable when joining similar companies, we’re losing some of our team members who have been like family and have helped build our companies. We are deeply grateful to each of them for their contributions and wish them all the very best. They will be missed.
Lastly, know that we’re also continuing to make progress on the longer term product strategy we committed to start sharing at Educause in October. The combined development organization for Blackboard Collaborate is of course bigger and stronger than either of our development organizations were on their own so we’re eager to start sharing our view of the road ahead for their work. The integrated product strategy and marketing teams, led by Annie Chechitelli, Mike Mabey, Steve Kann, Rajeev Arora and Valerie Schreiner are hard at work on the roadmap and look forward to sharing more detail with you in October.
I’ve shared all the names above because of the personal relationships that many of you have built with our Sales, Support, Services, Products and Customer Success teams. We value these close relationships immensely and I hope the continuity in our leadership team above will showcase our commitment to continue our philosophy of always putting our customers first.
If you attend the Educause conference, I hope to see you and talk to you there. If you have any questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to email me directly or the team at CollaborateLeadership@blackboard.com.
Thanks,
Maurice
]]>A Groundswell for Lecture Capture via Virtual Classroom Technologytag:wimba.com,2010:community/blog/1.11772010-07-28T13:50:54Z2010-07-28T15:04:54Zmwasowskimwasowski@wimba.comhttp://www.wimba.comAs more than 500 of you know, there has been a groundswell in the last 12 months about wanting to use virtual classroom technology for lecture capture. This was never more evident than yesterday when I had half-a-thousand educators from schools of all shapes, sizes, and locations register to learn about how they can conduct lecture capture via Wimba.
Though it has always been possible to archive live online classes, help sessions, or meetings held in virtual classrooms, the definition of ‘lecture capture’ means a few different things depending on who you ask. I’ve found three pervasive definitions:
1) To capture activity in a face-to-face classroom 2) To capture activity in a live online classroom 3) To simultaneously capture activity in a face-to-face and live online classroom (with students attending the same class either in-person or live online)
For years, many schools have purchased separate software applications to satisfy definitions 1 and 2. Most schools purchased a hardware-based system that allowed them to capture audio and video of instructors in a physical classroom, while the same schools also purchased a software-based system that allowed them to conduct real-time virtual classes – and subsequently archive them. But now that pennies are tight as budgets get stretched, it seems that many schools are finding ways to utilize virtual classroom technology to satisfy all their capturing needs.
Most schools already have a bevy of microphones, speakerphones, and video cameras. Now that Wimba Classroom inputs can accommodate countless a/v devices, schools are now figuring out that they can use their existing a/v equipment, hook it into Wimba Classroom, and suddenly be able to not only capture in-room classes, but can even pipe those classes live to online students and record all that activity as well. Truly killing two birds with one software.
Though several schools (most notably California State University Chico) have been capturing face-to-face and live online classes for years, the majority of institutions worldwide are just starting to explore this now. However, if the high volume of interest in yesterday’s lecture capture presentation is any indication, Chico State’s going to have a lot of company sooner than later.
]]>Wimba Versus Airplanestag:wimba.com,2010:community/blog/1.11722010-07-21T17:13:57Z2010-07-21T19:36:57Zmwasowskimwasowski@wimba.comhttp://www.wimba.com“Who is your main competitor?” an attendee asked my boss at the Training 2000 Conference.
“The airlines,” replied our CEO.
This was an actual exchange at the first trade show I ever attended as an employee of Wimba (well, then HorizonLive). I thought our CEO’s response was a bit snarky and/or presumptuous and/or way too boastful, and I quickly dismissed his reply.
So here I am, nearly 120 months to-the-day, and I just happened to recall this conversation. You see, a few minutes ago I wrapped up a Wimba Distinguished Lecture Series presentation that featured Randy Wald of the North Dakota University System and Scott Swanson of North Dakota State University as they not only discussed their myriad uses of Wimba throughout the state, but also the savings they’ve derived.
It turns out that the North Dakota folks are saving time and money left-and-right by using Wimba for everything from instruction (from music composition to architecture) and help, to meetings (from Extension Services meetings to disaster preparation sessions) and other non-instructional uses (from candidate job interviews to virtual conferences) – all without asking its dispersed staff to drive to face-to-face meeting sites or to a few hardware-based video conferencing sites.
For any of you who have made the 400-mile drive from Williston, ND to Fargo, ND – especially in the winter – you know it’s no picnic and that flying is definitely the preferred method of transportation. Therefore, now that so much travel is being Wimba-ized, maybe our CEO in 2000 was right all along when he made that boastful statement. Maybe we are competing against the travel industry in some form or another. I just hope I don’t have to start doing competitive research and analysis against the airlines.
]]>Hugs, Handshakes, and Collaborations at BbWorld 2010tag:wimba.com,2010:community/blog/1.11652010-07-14T15:12:18Z2010-07-14T21:26:18Zmwasowskimwasowski@wimba.comhttp://www.wimba.comHi Everyone, I apologize in advance, but this posting will likely be quite brief as I only have about 14 free minutes to write this. The reason why I’m so rushed? Because we’re all swamped here at BbWorld 2010 in Orlando.
Obviously the question that everyone here first asks me is, “So Matt, what do you think about the acquisition?" But what’s most interesting about this question is the different backgrounds of those who ask it. For instance, I’ve had several long-time Wimba customers ask me this question and it seems they ask it out of genuine curiosity and excitement because they’ve seen Wimba/HorizonLive/Horizon Wimba go through many iterations in the past. I’ve had several customers former ANGEL – and now Blackboard Learn – customers ask me this question and it seems they ask it out of genuine excitement and curiosity because they saw ANGEL go through a similar process last year and were mostly pleased with how smoothly everything went. And I’ve also had several customers show concern about the changes out of concern because we’ve developed such deep relationships and they want to ensure these relationships remain strong. This has floored me! Allow me to explain.
I’m not much of a hugger. I prefer a handshake or a wave, but for some reason hugs just don’t sit well with me. I’m not exactly sure why, but I’m just wired to stay away from physical contact. So the fact that I’ve had countless customers in the last 24 hours run up to me and hug me and thank me – and the entire Wimba team – has been more gratifying than I can begin to explain in the remaining 6 minutes I have to finish this post. I always suspected we made a meaningful impact on our customers, but never could a suspicion be more confirmed than this one has since I arrived. Our customers have come out of the woodwork to show their support and to thank us for all the work and care we’ve demonstrated. So for that, I can’t thank them enough.
However, I do want to add that what’s been even more gratifying is that I’ve seen a similar number of hugs happening at the Elluminate booth as well. I had a hunch for a long time that Elluminate’s customers were just as happy and loyal as ours, and that hunch too has been confirmed. I’ve seen Elluminate’s blue-clad staff receive hug and after hug after hug.
The reason I’m pointing out all of this hugging and complimenting – along with the positive comments we’ve heard from so many former ANGEL folks – is that the future keeps getting brighter and brighter. Blackboard Learn President Ray Henderson and the rest of the Blackboard Collaborate transition team is going out of its way to ensure that this customer devotion remains priority #1 . And for that, I want to hug Ray myself – and encourage all of our customers to do so too. Watch out, Ray, hugs (well, handshakes in my case) are closer than they appear!
]]>Go Cavs! Go Wimba! Go Blackboard Collaborate!tag:wimba.com,2010:community/blog/1.11642010-07-09T19:26:29Z2010-07-09T20:33:29Zmwasowskimwasowski@wimba.comhttp://www.wimba.comLet me begin by catching my breath. Phew. What a week! Definitely one for the record books.
As many of you know, even though I’ve always worked for Wimba here in New York, my heart is still in Cleveland where I was born-and-raised to be a die-hard Browns, Indians, and Cavs fan. So when this week began, I was already anxious enough as I anticipated ‘The Decision’ by LeBron James. My friends and coworkers and I exhausted countless hours speculating whether or not my beloved Cavaliers would take the floor this fall with or without its all-time greatest player. I practically gave myself an ulcer thinking about it.
And then just as my anxiety was nearly at its apex, along came the news on Wednesday that Blackboard was acquiring both Wimba and Elluminate. A double-whammy!
I realize that many of you may be having a difficult time understanding how I could possibly compare the stress of being a sports fan to the stress of corporate changes, but I do so under the guise that these are dramatic changes to two of the most deep-seeded loves I possess. I grew up a die-hard Cleveland fan and will stay with my teams through thick-and-thin, and similarly, I essentially grew up with Wimba and will stick with it through its future as well.
I believe the basic values of loyalty and hard work are what make Cleveland sports fans so respected (even though we whine a lot, but can you blame us?) and I also believe those same values epitomize the character of Wimba. Our team is undyingly loyal to our customers and we work our tails off to ensure they’re getting the best experience we can possibly give them. Even though the name on the front of our Wimba jersey will soon change, the heart inside the jersey will not.
Go Cavs! Go Wimba! Go Blackboard Collaborate!
]]>The Biggest of Many Changes - Blackboard to Acquire Wimba AND Elluminatetag:wimba.com,2010:community/blog/1.11612010-07-07T20:07:49Z2010-07-07T21:15:49Zmwasowskimwasowski@wimba.comhttp://www.wimba.comAs many of you know, last month I celebrated my 10-year Wimba anniversary. My dear colleague – and only other 10+-year veteran – Annie Chechitelli, organized a nice party for me last week at which a slew of current and past Wimbians celebrated my tenure at the company. And as it naturally happens at any reunion, we all reminisced and told stories of the past decade and remarked about how much things have changed. In fact, you can read a lot about my tenure at Wimba in my end-of-the-decade blog posting.
I’ve been here for the gamut; from HorizonLive and Horizon Wimba, to acquisitions of Silicon Chalk, Connected Learning, and Brownstone. I was even here as we welcomed a new management team a little over a year ago. So yes, I’ve always known that if there is one constant at Wimba, that that constant is change. In fact, a lot of us who have been here for several years always enjoyed the fact that we’ve seen the company grow and grow and grow.
Which brings us to today – our biggest change by far.
As you’ve probably heard by now, not only has Blackboard acquired us, but it also acquired Elluminate so it can begin a new collaboration division which it will call Blackboard Collaborate. Like many of you, I too have known numerous Blackboard and Elluminate staff for years, so I look forward to working with both of them in a vastly new, well, collaboration. Here we go!
]]>We’re on an Awards Rolltag:wimba.com,2010:community/blog/1.11232010-05-20T13:54:07Z2010-05-20T15:00:07Zmwasowskimwasowski@wimba.comhttp://www.wimba.comI’m going to keep this short-and-sweet, but the last 7 days have seen us on an awards roll. Last week we heard that Janice Selekman, professor in the School of Nursing at the University of Delaware, has been named the School Nurse Educator of the Year by the National Association of School Nurses. She was honored at the spring meeting of the Delaware School Nurse Association (DNSA) in Dover on May 6. She won primarily based on her unique use of Wimba.
If this keeps up, we’re going to have buy a new trophy case - a good problem to have!
]]>Wimba, The Aughts, and Metag:wimba.com,2009:community/blog/1.10292009-12-15T14:26:11Z2010-03-02T15:24:11Zmwasowskimwasowski@wimba.comhttp://www.wimba.comAs January 1, 2010 quickly draws near, we’re inundated with countless recaps of the first decade of the second millennium (A.D., of course). Apparently Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was the best movie of the aughts, and I now know that, according to most pop-culture aficionados, reality TV marred the decade and has potentially ruined television as we know it. Well, what you’re about to read has nothing to do with the large or small screens of the 2000’s, rather I’m here to share my own unique perspective on the aughts; my decade at Wimba.
As most readers of this blog know, I’m essentially a Wimba lifer, and therefore fall on the high end of the scale that measures how long employees typically stay at the same job. I started at Wimba in June 2000 as the internet bubble had mostly deflated but hadn’t entirely burst. Luckily for me, my previous employer went bubble-up soon enough that within three days of its demise I was able to find one of the few “dot-coms” that was in the black and that, more importantly, needed a savvy software marketer. Thus, I landed here at Wimba. Well, HorizonLive.
In terms of technology and/or Moore’s Law, a decade may as well be a century. In June 2000 the idea of technology-enabled online learning had only been a handful of years old, and the dominant definition at the time mostly comprised of creating a webpage onto which an instructor of a face-to-face class could house his or her syllabus and perhaps a few study resources. Companies like Blackboard, eCollege, and WebCT were on-par with companies like Prometheus and Mad Duck, and exhibit halls at education technology conferences were cluttered with myriad other fresh-faced start-ups all looking to secure a foothold in this potentially exhilarating market. But HorizonLive had a different vision that then sat on the fringes.
HorizonLive knew that education thrives when interaction transpires. Students interacting with classmates. Classmates interacting with instructors. Instructors interacting with administration. Whomever does the interacting, it doesn’t much matter, as long as they’re engaged, enthusiastic, and human. HorizonLive’s tagline was: Collaborate. Interact. Learn. It was so simple yet so powerful. After all, meaningful interaction leads to enhanced learning. Truer words were never spoke – or tagline written. HorizonLive knew that once a viable foundation for online instruction had been laid, that the human element would need to shine through in order for true success. So when I first learned of this unique vision, it was love at first sight.
I spent the first half of the decade watching HorizonLive steadily grow, anxiously awaiting for schools across the globe to ready themselves for true, robust, more natural online learning. Forward-looking early adopters such as CSU, Chico dipped their toes in the water and realized that an engaged community was a successful community. I started the HorizonLive Desktop Lecture Series and, during the very second edition, found myself communicating with nearly 150 people from more than 40 countries, including Myanmar. I hadn’t even heard of Myanmar! The groundwork was clearly being laid.
At one point in 2001, myself and a few co-workers shook nervously as one of the industry leaders, Carol Vallone, CEO of almighty WebCT, visited our offices because we were to originate a live webcast of her giving the keynote speech to her company’s Asia-Pacific users conference in Sydney. As thunder cracked and lightning lit up the Empire State Building which was visible from the window behind her chair, we monitored the presentation, reveling in the fact that hundreds of Australians and New Zealanders were hearing and seeing Carol, just as we were, despite the fact that they were 10,000 miles away and that it was tomorrow for them. It’s these memories that make me smile when I think of how far we’ve come.
But things weren’t always inspiring or smooth. The most vivid memory I still have from my days here at Wimba is, like that of so many New Yorkers, my memory of September 11, 2001. Our CEO’s balcony had a clear, unobstructed view of the World Trade Center, and on that clear, warm, late-summer day, my co-workers and I stood on that balcony and watched the second plane hit and the towers fall. While some of my colleagues immediately headed for their homes by whatever means they could find, I remained in the office out of fear that something else could happen. I remained holed-up for several hours until I headed outside for my eight-mile trek home to Brooklyn amid palpable fear, confusion, terror, and shock. We closed our office the next day but returned back on Thursday the 13th to find each of us completely uncertain about our circumstances but absolutely certain about how thankful we were that many of us were physically ok. And then, in true New York fashion, we got back to work.
Along the way for the next few years, as I occasionally distracted myself at work with crazy new things like Napster and Friendster, the ground swelled, and so did HorizonLive. We merged with an innovative company based in the French Silicon Valley with a funny named that we liked, but since we liked our name too, we created a combined company called Horizon Wimba. A name only a mother could love. But apparently a growing technology company has many mothers, because so many of us indeed loved it.
As Horizon Wimba then grew by adding two additional tech firms under its umbrella, we watched more and more educators realize that collaboration is a necessary and critical element to a successful education - whether online or not. We also watched more and more educators – along with millions of other regular folks – on a new-fangled website called YouTube and listened to the same people via ‘podcasts’ on iPods. Ah, technology.
And we kept rolling along. I traveled the globe pitching the good word of Horizon Wimba, along the way enduring an eight-week bout of poison ivy incurred at a conference in Georgia, and watched my toes swell to three times their size after stepping on a sea urchin while at a conference in the Virgin Islands. The things I do for this company!
Horizon Wimba finally realized what was known all along – that its hideous name had to go. Though at the time ‘Collaborate. Interact. Learn.’ had changed to ‘Reach Beyond the Classroom,’ we realized that technology doesn’t teach people, but rather, People Teach People. And the rest as they say…is…well, Wimba.
Which brings me to today – 10 years later. A once fledgling start-up, thanks to a sound vision, sounder technology, and scores of dedication, has become established. Every day we help thousands of schools in nearly 50 countries inspire and reach their invaluable students. Though our offices no longer have wires hanging from the ceilings, we still retain the same start-up mentality of never settling and always hustling (and we still, of course, have Annie Chechitelli around too..ha!). We know the last decade has witnessed tremendous innovation no one thought possible in December 1999, so we’re trying as hard as we can to ensure that we’re still innovating 10 years from now. I can’t wait to sit at my desk (or spaceship?) in December 2019 to recall my memories of the 2010’s.
When we hire new staff, I often make a point of telling them that at Wimba they can make a meaningful contribution to people’s lives – that they’re contributing to the greater good. I hope this makes them excited to work for Wimba and proud to tell their friends and family what they do. It certainly does for me. After all, learning, education, life; they’re all about relationships and making relationships work in a meaningful and productive way. And it’s relationships (people not just teaching people, but helping, learning from, nurturing, laughing, and loving) that highlight my decade at Wimba. While there are too many folks to call out by name – between my current and past colleagues, our thousands of customers, and the innumerable educators with whom I’ve interacted both online and face-to-face – I’ve been lucky enough to get to know so many people who care so much about advancing the lives of others. And in turn, they’ve advanced mine in more ways that I could ever begin to describe.