New York, NY – (December 6, 2006) – Moodle, meet Horizon Wimba’s Live Classroom. Horizon Wimba’s Live Classroom, meet Moodle. Horizon Wimba, the leading provider of collaborative software to the online education market, announced today that in January its Live Classroom will integrate with Moodle, a free virtual learning environment. With the integration, Moodle users worldwide will easily be able to hold live online classes, office hours, study groups, and meetings.
Similar to Horizon Wimba’s robust integrations with other course management systems such as ANGEL, Blackboard, and WebCT, Live Classroom will integrate so thoroughly with Moodle that it will practically appear as a native activity module within Moodle. In addition to offering basic single sign-on and password authentication, the integration will also give Moodle users the ability to:
· Add a Live Classroom to any Moodle course from the ‘Add An Activity Module’ drop-down menu
· Configure Live Classroom settings such as audio and video, eBoard access, chat options, and presenter privileges, from within Moodle
· Manage Live Classroom content
· View Live Classroom attendance and polling reports
· Add Live Classroom meeting reminders to the Moodle calendar
· Configure Live Classroom server settings from within the Moodle Module Configuration Administration pages
· Create additional classes or study groups
This integration with Live Classroom comes on the heels of Horizon Wimba’s recent upgrade of its content authoring tool, Course Genie, which allows users to export their Microsoft Word® documents into HTML that can easily be uploaded into their online Moodle courses.
“Moodle has taken the education world by storm, particularly in Europe and Australia, and we wanted to make sure that its growing user base has easy access to our collaborative technologies,” said Tommaso Trionfi, CEO of Horizon Wimba. “We constantly hear that ease-of-use is the most important characteristic for any software, and we therefore strive to make our tools as easy to use as possible, particularly for educators already accustomed to using other tools as prolific as Moodle. We continue to lead the way in terms of integrating collaborative technologies for online education, and we’re thrilled that Moodle users worldwide will more easily be able to add a human touch to their online courses.”
Horizon Wimba plans to release a Moodle integration for its Wimba Voice Tools shortly.