Wimba

For immediate release

This is Not Your Mother’s Backpack: Today’s Students Pack Different Tools and Greater Expectations for Collaboration

Higher Education Institutions Expand Use of Wimba’s Solutions to Meet Students’ Expectations

NEW YORK – September 9, 2009 –As the fall semester kicks off, students return to campus with backpacks full of “must-have” items like laptops, Netbooks, smart phones and eReaders – technologies integral to the way they communicate and acquire information on a daily basis. Students also come to campus with the expectation that these tools will be central to their educational experience.  Wimba®, Inc., the education technology company that helps people teach people, announced today that it sees an increasing number of its customers use Wimba solutions to meet student expectations for innovative tools that match the real-time collaboration relied upon outside of the classroom.

Academic-centric Instant Messaging 
Instant messaging is among the most popular methods of communication for students today. Hundreds of higher education institutions have deployed Wimba’s academic-centric instant messaging platform, Wimba Pronto™, so that thousands of students, faculty and administrators can connect and collaborate both formally and informally with other members of their learning community.

“Our eLearning stakeholders are particularly excited about Wimba Pronto. They love that students will be able to hear and see their instructor explaining and illustrating a concept through a live, visual interface. The setup is painless; it’s butter on bread ease of use,” said Terry Pollard, eLearning Specialist, Mississippi State Board for Community and Junior Colleges.

Online tutoring, study sessions, office hours, and services offer greater flexibility for students, faculty, and administrators both on and off campus.  Blended audio and video capabilities, along with application sharing and a state-of-the-art whiteboard enable robust communication to take place regardless of physical classrooms.  Ivy Tech Community College, Valley City State University, and Northeastern University - are only a handful of the many learning communities serving their students with Wimba Pronto.

Improved Student Engagement
The most popular technologies among 18 – 24 year-olds are those that support Interactive, social environments.  A recent report from Participatory Marketing Network (PMN) indicates that 99% of this demographic maintain active user profiles on at least one social network. Colleges and universities recognize that teaching and learning must include tools that facilitate real-time, social interaction to increase student engagement and retention.

 “I really like Wimba because it brings faculty closer together with their students to provide a level of engagement that simply is not available in other first-generation online course applications,” said Chuck Kilfoye, Director of Distance Learning, Boston University.

M-Learning
Smart phones are rapidly becoming the new on-the-go laptops, resulting in an explosion of mobile applications. In higher education this translates into mobile or M-Learning opportunities in which teaching, learning and collaboration are increasingly taking place through cell phones or other mobile devices.

To meet the demand for student’s access to classroom content anytime, anyway, anyplace, Wimba recently added MP4 functionality to Wimba Classroom™ 6.0 so that faculty or students can easily create and export content, making it easily portable, in either MP3 or MP4 files, to course management systems (CMS), YouTube, iTunes University, Facebook, or other content management systems.

“The few things that I had hoped for are now available with Wimba 6.0.  Making class archives more portable and flexible as MP4 files is an absolute dream for an instructor and student! Maximum flexibility,” said Janet Welch, Chairperson of Curriculum Design, Red Deer College.

“Collaboration has always been an essential part of education,” said Carol Vallone, Wimba’s Acting CEO and Chairman of the Board. “Today’s technologies play an incredibly important role in enhancing collaboration to better engage students. This is what Wimba is all about and our solutions have, and will continue to be, focused on supporting this need.”

The Wimba Collaboration Suite™ - recently awarded the 2009 “Best Education Solution” CODiE award by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) - enhances learning, improves outcomes and increases student retention.  By combining interactive technologies such as voice, video, podcasting, instant messaging, application sharing, polling and whiteboarding, learning communities are empowered with a unique collaborative environment that fosters dynamic student-to-instructor, student-to-student and instructor-to-instructor interaction.