New York, NY and Toowoomba, Queenland, Australia – (July 23, 2008) – Wimba, the education technology company that helps people teach people, today announced that the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) has purchased the Wimba Collaboration Suite in order to incorporate high-quality voice and video collaboration into its Moodle-based online teaching and learning program. With the transaction facilitated by NetSpot, a Premium eLearning Technology Services Partner to education organisations within the Asia Pacific region, the Wimba Collaboration Suite will help USQ enhance learning, improve outcomes, and increase retention rates for more than 19,000 distance education students.
USQ intends to use Wimba Classroom for a range of instructional and non-instructional uses such as holding small lecture groups and tutorials, offering mini conferences across its three campuses, and streaming lectures when instructors need to share their desktops. Additionally, it will rely on Wimba Voice for troubleshooting with students and to encourage them to work together virtually. USQ will also create podcasts and vocal welcomes messages in online courses, and to contextualise difficult concepts within its courses.
USQ was the first university in Australia to adopt Moodle, a virtual learning environment, at an enterprise level, and will now be the first university in Australia to roll out the complete Wimba Collaboration Suite via Wimba’s Moodle Module integration. USQ believes the addition of Wimba will enliven the online course environment for its teachers and students. Through Wimba’s thorough integration with Moodle, USQ students will now be able to enjoy real-time and asynchronous communication with their teachers and classmates
Wimba offers the most comprehensive suite of collaboration products created exclusively for educational purposes. The Wimba Collaboration Suite empowers educators and publishers with a unique collaborative approach that enhances learning, improves outcomes, and increases student retention. Wimba Classroom allows students and teachers to communicate naturally. It not only offers a comprehensive features set for collaboration; but it also offers these features in a way to best suit teaching and learning by focusing attention on the content and speaker, not on the technology. And with Wimba Voice, adding voice to an otherwise text-only course site makes the learning process more interesting and stimulating, thus increasing the rate of learning and knowledge retention.
NetSpot helps institutions focus on their core mission by managing their eLearning technology and by licensing
world class software. NetSpot is an official partner to both Moodle and Wimba in Australia.
“78% of our students study by distance education – that’s 19,000 students – so we needed a robust tool that we could use in a range of circumstances,” said Dr. Michael Sankey, Learning and Teaching Support Unit, University of Southern Queensland. “Voice and image was important as we have 90 different nationalities studying with us, so we needed a tool that would allow a range of modalities to be used in presentations. We looked at other products but felt Wimba offered us a greater selection and the right type of tools. Our distance education cohort is important, and we like the idea of online engagement and making links between the on- and off-campus students.”
”Great teaching is not just about what is said, but about non-verbal cues communicated by facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice, and we hope that USQ’s great teachers will be able to utilize Wimba to express their most important asset – themselves,” said Yancy Oshita, Chief Marketing Officer and EVP of Wimba. ”We’ve long worked with NetSpot to ensure that education institutions throughout Australia and the rest of the Asia Pacific region have access to the latest educational software, so we’re thrilled that a university as prominent as USQ has joined our team.”