Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, UK – (May 31, 2007) – Wimba tools were the number one choice by The University of the West of England (UWE), selected to enhance their online learning through integration with their virtual learning environment – Blackboard Academic Suite.
“The Wimba Collaboration Suite of tools will bolster the multi-media capabilities to our VLE, potentially enriching the online learning experience while placing minimal demands on our academic staff and on our systems” Manuel Frutos-Perez, Senior Lecturer, E-learning Development Officer reveals.
The Wimba Collaboration Suite offers simple user-friendly tools where the only real limit is the imagination. It puts the power in the hands of the individual tutor/lecturer to create imaginative and engaging content for their student courses. Combining interactivities such as voice, video, podcasting, rich content authoring, assessment, and instant messaging, Wimba’s Collaboration Suite bridges the divide between human interaction and technology to ensure that people, not computers, teach people.
The UWE is a modern, growing university in the thriving city of Bristol. It is the largest provider of higher education in the south west of England and one of the largest providers in the country.
Online learning activities have matured across the board at UWE, and they are currently deploying an ambitious set of upgrades that will “greatly enhance the online learning experience of the students.” As well as plans to integrate the Suite with the VLE they are also exploring integration with further university systems such us myUWE (institutional portal) and the Research Observatory (institution-wide online research teaching and learning resource).
Promotion of the tools to encourage use across all faculties will include Wimba training in the e-learning staff development courses, raising awareness of its potential during pedagogy dissemination seminars, active recruitment of e-learning champions across different faculties to pilot the use of the different Wimba tools and report to interested academic groups on their experiences. In this way, UWE hope to generate internal debate that will lead to the sharing of good practice.
Some disciplines belonging to the fields of Applied Sciences, Health and Social Care, Law and Art, Media and Design already make extensive use of multi-media resources and “we expect to see early adoption of the tools across those domains”. Currently there are 1,500 courses active in Blackboard and an estimated three quarters of UWE’s academic modular provision is supported by the VLE.
“We expect the uptake of the Wimba tools to grow rapidly over time. The feedback from the preliminary evaluations has been very positive and we look forward to supporting our academic staff to make best use of the rich functionality provided by Wimba.”