NEW YORK and CAMBRIDGE, UNITED KINGDOM – December 3, 2008 – Wimba® Inc., the education technology company that helps people teach people, announced today that the International Virtual Dental School (IVIDENT) has licensed Wimba Classroom™ for its global, online dental training program. IVIDENT – led by King’s College London’s Dental Institute – aims to bridge the gap between skills development for dentists and the availability of expert teachers, particularly in niche specialised fields of training.
IVIDENT is a multi-million pound, three-year project jointly funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England and the Department of Health that supports the complete dental education cycle through an innovative flexible learning platform. It aims to address shortages in teaching staff in the smaller specialties, and has completed its first suite of tools for testing at King’s College London. This includes the implementation of an elective capability for fifth year dental students who travel abroad.
“Access to online dental education and training has been invaluable to our college and students,” said Dr. Patricia Reynolds, Professor of Dental Education and Director of Flexible Learning at King’s College London Dental Institute. “IVIDENT is working with its five partners in UK to address the challenge of succession of specialised teachers and to ensure continued high quality training for students across the UK and beyond. Wimba’s technology is enabling us to add an important collaboration and presentation tool to IVIDENT’s own suite of tools. Wimba has already been used to facilitate international meetings and lectures.”
The largest dental academic centre in the UK, King’s College London Dental Institute at Guy’s King’s College and St. Thomas Hospitals is planning to implement additional IVIDENT tools in the coming months. Several other prominent dental institutions in the UK are founding partners of the IVIDENT project including Bristol University, Queen’s University Belfast, the Eastman Dental Institute of University College London and the University of Portsmouth. For more information on IVIDENT, please visit http://www.ivident.info.
“The IVIDENT programme is significantly changing dental education, enabling broader and deeper access to training for students around the globe,” said Yancy Oshita, Wimba’s Executive Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing. “We are pleased that our technology is part of such an important step in improving oral healthcare education and applaud the efforts of all who have developed this innovative program.”
Wimba Classroom is part of the Wimba Collaboration Suite™, which offers a rich array of collaborative applications that allow faculty to retain the highly personal and dynamic nature of traditional classroom instruction by facilitating the use of online video, voice, instant messaging, content authoring, application sharing and white boarding, while also seamlessly integrating with a college or university’s existing course management systems/virtual learning environments (CMS/VLE) such as Blackboard® and Moodle. With this combination, Wimba offers institutions the flexibility they need so that instructors can manage their course content and create customised rooms from within their familiar CMS/VLE environment.