Wimba

Customer Spotlights

Learn how Wimba’s Collaboration solutions have made a difference in the way teachers communicate and teach, students engage and learn, and community is built and fostered.

• Instruction Across Multiple Disciplines
• Increasing Revenue and Enrollment
• Increasing Retention Rates
• Innovative Use of Wimba Pronto
• Accessibility
• Reducing Sense of Isolation
• K12: Expanding Curriculum and Improving Outcomes
• Publishers

Wimba Collaboration Suite for Instruction Across Multiple Disciplines:

York St John University

York St John University

York St John University has used Wimba Classroom for a number of courses including Business of International Trade and Globalisation, the European Business Environment, the Bahrain PCAP, and the MA International Studies. Student feedback has been extremely positive, and contributed to an almost 90% pass rate in the module assessments in one course. Many students welcomed being able to access archives of Wimba Classroom sessions and were enthusiastic about the technology and the benefits on their learning. One student commented that he thought Facebook was good until he saw Wimba Classroom! Others commented that they enjoyed the flexibility and also appreciated the different mode of delivery.

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University of the West of England

University of the West of England

Ranked 5th in England out of 83 Higher Education institutions in a Teaching Quality Assessment league table published in the Times Higher Educational Supplement, the University of the West of England (UWE) is a forward looking university. With more than 30,000 students and 3,000 staff, UWE is the largest provider of higher education in the southwest of England. Students come to UWE from all parts of the UK while international students hail from more than 50 countries worldwide. To ensure it remains at the forefront, UWE is very active in using technology to support teaching and learning activities.. UWE implemented the Wimba Collaboration Suite in September 2007 in numerous subjects ranging from computing and architecture to business and law. And in just a few short months, Wimba Classroom, Wimba Voice, and Wimba Create were all quickly adopted and became integral parts of many courses. Click to read more.

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University of Bristol

University of Bristol

In 2005, the University of Bristol launched an innovative and aggressive E-Learning Strategy. Through the use of appropriate technology, the project’s aim is to enhance the student learning experience and to maintain the academic rigor of both undergraduate and postgraduate programs without compromising the output of research-active academic staff. Bristol created this initiative to ensure that it maintains its reputation for teaching excellence and to ensure that it continues to attract the best students. Bristol strives to remain at the forefront of educational provision and understands it can only do so if it draws on appropriate innovative teaching and learning technologies and utilises the best methods of programme delivery – and one of these technologies is Wimba.

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SouthWest London Academic Network & London College of Communication

SouthWest London Academic Network & London College of Communication

Video case study! This video describes how The SouthWest London Academic Network (SWAN), a strategic alliance between Kingston University, St Georges, University of London and Royal Holloway, University of London, creates new opportunities in biological and biomedical sciences, leadership and management education for health professionals and inter-professional practice and learning. Meanwhile, the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London is one of the leading arts schools in all of Europe. In this 5-minute video, learn how Wimba plays an important role in the development of these diverse institutions' online programs.

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Lawrence Technological University

Lawrence Technological University

In mid-February 2009, a distinguished scholar visited a Nonprofit Management class at Lawrence Technological University (LTU) and the class’s regular professor naturally asked the scholar to hold a lecture and discussion with his students. Using Wimba Classroom to record every aspect of the in-class lecture, all audible and visual elements were captured for later review and the visiting scholar’s lecture has since been shared with classes around the entire university. This is just one of numerous examples of how LTU has found myriad uses of Wimba Classroom, uses that stretch far beyond offering live, online classes.

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Kansas State University

Kansas State University

K-State has one of the largest online offerings of any school in the world.  According to Bryan Vandiviere, Web Presentation Technology Coordinator at Kansas State University, more than 900 faculty use either Wimba Classroom or Wimba Voice to bring a collaborative elements to their online courses.  In fact, more than 700 courses count on Wimba each semester.  As the primary support person for Wimba at K-State, Vandiviere proudly boasts that he can support all faculty by just himself and few work-study students.  “In the Fall 2007 semester alone, Kansas State University faculty combined to hold 696 live classes and created 759 archives via Wimba Classroom,” Vandiviere said happily.  “Amazingly, all of this was supported by only one full-time technology staff member and three students.”

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Four Year Colleges

Four Year Colleges

A video case study! Want to learn how six leading universities increase retention rates, enhance learning, and improve student outcomes? This 5-minute video compilation features Drexel University, Kansas State University, Dalhousie University, University of Missouri-St Louis, Arizona State University, and Northeastern University. “Retention can be improved with [Wimba],” says Robert Keel of UMSL.

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Drexel University

Drexel University

Drexel University is widely known for its Engineering, Technology, and Business programs, but its curriculum serves countless other disciplines as well.  From Arts & Sciences to Education, to Nursing, like many schools, Drexel offers many courses across a wide spectrum of academic disciplines – face-to-face, via a hybrid approach, or online. But now, thanks to the diversity available within the Wimba Collaboration Suite, different departments are finding easy answers to their unique needs.

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Community Colleges

Community Colleges

A video case study! Learn first-hand in this 5-minute video how three community colleges, Southern State Community College (OH), Centennial College (ON), and Pima Community College (AZ) use Wimba for everything from saving money by reducing faculty and student travel costs, to running entire languages programs. “We wouldn’t have an online language program if it wasn’t for Wimba,” says Len Thurman of Pima Community College.

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College of Southern Nevada

College of Southern Nevada

“We’re heavily rolling out Wimba for meetings,” says Vartouhi Asherian, Instructional Designer and Professor at the College of Southern Nevada.  “We’ve had huge budget cuts at the state level . We have a lot of committees, which are dispersed from our sites, so we’re incorporating meetings via Wimba Classroom so everyone can participate.  We can’t get everyone to come in to our main campuses.  That tells us we really need to incorporate the technology that fits out needs. Wimba can make everything easier, bring people closer together, and help us operate more efficiently.”

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Cleveland State Community College

Cleveland State Community College

“When I began at Cleveland State Community College I quickly found out that we had a decade-old ITV system that was no longer supported even though we had a maintenance agreement.  I also discovered it was consuming 350-500 kbs of bandwidth and this was consuming a full third of our satellite campuses’ bandwidth,” says Dr. Ronald Paige, the Director of Instructional Technology at Cleveland State Community College.  He quickly sought an online alternative to replace ITV. By using Wimba Classroom, CSCC would succeed in practically replicating the ITV experience so that remote online students could see and hear everything happening in a face-to-face classroom from the convenience of their own computers.  Thanks in large part to Wimba Classroom, CSCC is saving money while its students save time, now that CSCC has transitioned its teleconference courses to the web.

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Central Texas College

Central Texas College

In addition to specific classes that range across all disciplines from American Literature and Calculus, to Criminal Law and Poetry, Central Texas College’s Distance Education team hosts up to 12 live online Blackboard trainings each month, multiple professional development seminars, and monthly live orientations for new students via Wimba.  In addition, Wimba is an essential part of the school’s math and English tutoring programs. Further, CTC’s language learning courses – covering all major languages – are emerging and student and faculty regularly meet in Wimba Classroom or meet asynchronously by using the voice boards of Wimba Voice, during which faculty provide students with real demonstrations and corrections of the spoken language, and students converse and aid each other vocally. Beyond instruction and tutoring, CTC faculty rely on Wimba Classroom for holding live online mentoring sessions, office hours, and exam review. 

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Boston University

Boston University

Located in the heart of Boston, Boston University (BU) is the fourth largest private university in the United States, yet prior to 2000 it had no online courses. Upon quickly developing a full breadth of asynchronous online course offerings that operated via the then WebCT course management system, in 2002 BU began offering some of its courses live online via Wimba Classroom in order to add a livelier element to its online courses. Now, in 2009, BU offers 10 fully online degree programs and 10 online certificates in a variety of disciplines ranging from criminal justice and computer science, to health communication, music education, and occupational therapy. Click to read more.

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Auburn University

Auburn University

After being an early adopter of WebCT Campus Edition (now Blackboard) in the 1990’s, Auburn turned to the Wimba Collaboration Suite in 2002 as a means of adding critical speaking and listening components to its foreign language courses. But after seeing how its students excelled by adding just a few collaborative elements to its language courses, Auburn quickly added the rest of the Wimba Collaboration Suite to its distance program. In fact, the Wimba Collaboration Suite offers so many different collaborative elements, a significant number of departments at Auburn quickly filled a need by using Wimba.

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Increasing Revenue and Enrollment by Expanding a School's Reach:

West Virginia University

West Virginia University

Covering a diverse array of subjects such as Nursing, Foreign Languages, Marketing, and Special Education, WVU has utilized Wimba since 2004 to be a collaborative hub for hundreds of online sections, and as a result, WVU has already seen many tangible successes. WVU has seen clear benefits from using Wimba such as increased enrollments by recruiting students worldwide, significant cost savings by transitioning from satellite broadcasts to web-based courses, increased student engagement, and increased student satisfaction.

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University of Alabama School of Law

University of Alabama School of Law

With Wimba, The University of Alabama Tax Law program attracts the best and brightest students from around the country who are eager to learn from the world’s top instructors. The Law School actively promotes its program by telling prospective students that Wimba is its competitive advantage.

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San Diego State University

San Diego State University

"Wimba saved our department $30,000 on lecturers and $45,000 on hardware, for a total savings of $75,000.”

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Massey University (New Zealand)

Massey University (New Zealand)

“All of our professional development for online learning and teaching is now ALL online, and we think that is unique,” says O’Hara. “The key for us delivering online was that we wanted lecturers to experience what students would experience – they need to see what it feels like to be an online student.”

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Central Gippsland Institute of TAFE

Central Gippsland Institute of TAFE

"The ability to expand the number of courses offered online translates directly to higher capacity for enrollment and higher levels of revenue.”

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CSU Chico Lecture Capture

CSU Chico Lecture Capture

While some students are seated in a physical classroom, other students are logged in remotely via Wimba Classroom and see the instructor via a television-quality video camera that is set up in the classroom. Interestingly, because Wimba Classroom supports a wide variety of video inputs, these classes could even be filmed by a simple webcam or digital video camera. During class, these online students hear and see the lecturer as well as all visual materials which get displayed through the Wimba’s whiteboard. Click to read more.

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University of Georgia’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences

University of Georgia’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences

By meeting live online via Wimba Classroom instead of having staff drive to face-to-face sites in rural areas, the University of Georgia Cooperative Extension Service saved $21,562, 46,595 miles of travel, and the Earth.

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Increasing Retention Rates:

University of Georgia

University of Georgia

University of Georgia Bridges Languages and Cultures for the U.S.-Brazil Consortium on Technology Integration Ranked in the top 20 among public universities in the United States by U.S. News and World Report, the University of Georgia (UGA) is on the move. UGA is “building the New Learning Environment,” an academic and intellectual community which recognizes that the digital age is transforming traditional academic disciplines. And thanks in part to Wimba, UGA has become one of the leading technology innovators in the country, and has already embarked on one of the most unique worldwide distance education initiatives.

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Great Basin College

Great Basin College

Great Basin College (GBC) serves students spread across more than 60,000 square miles of rural central Nevada. Great Basin College uses Wimba Classroom to teach disciplines ranging from math to survey courses. In addition to Wimba Classroom, GBC also relies on Wimba Voice for asynchronous voice interaction. Lisa Frazier, curriculum development specialist, says online retention is around 79 percent and retention in classes that rely on Wimba is 84 percent.

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Innovative Use of Wimba Pronto Instant Messaging:

Ivy Tech Community College

Ivy Tech Community College

With more than 100,000 students, Ivy Tech Community College (ITCC) is the largest accredited school in North America. ITCC has 14 regional sites located throughout Indiana, offering both undergraduate and technical courses to its students, all of whom either commute to campus to take their courses remotely. And since its new president set into motion a plan to map out an enhanced distance education strategy for the school, ITCC has also become the fastest growing institution in the state. Therefore, to help compensate for its influx of students, ITCC adopted Wimba Pronto in Spring 2007 in order to offer the easiest means of spontaneous, instant communication between students and instructors. Upon implementing Wimba Pronto, it only took a few months for more than 7,000 students and faculty to start using it for instant, informal communication.

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Grand Rapids Community College

Grand Rapids Community College

Located in Western Michigan, Grand Rapids Community College (GRCC) is a two-year community college serving more than 15,000 students per semester. One of the leading community colleges in the United States, GRCC offers a wide curriculum that caters to its diverse student base. GRCC students range from the traditional 18-21 year old college-age student, to working adults who are learning new skills in order to advance their careers. And in order to maintain its lofty stature among community colleges, GRCC boasts an aggressive and innovative technology program to ensure its students are ready for the workforce – a technology program that has relied on Wimba for several years. “Wimba Pronto is an exciting tool because it lets students connect in an instant way,” says Eric Kunnen, Coordinator of Instructional Technologies . “With Pronto, our students better connect with each other and better with their instructors.”

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Accessibility for those with Disabilities:

The Neil Squire Society

The Neil Squire Society

In January 2008 a major snowstorm hit British Columbia (BC). While only half of The Neil Squire Society’s participants – all of whom are people with disabilities – were able to make it to their face-to-face course sites throughout the province, all remaining participants made it to their class, and participated in the class, via Wimba Classroom.

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Bloomsburg University

Bloomsburg University

When it comes to accessibility within online education, the case can be made that Dr. Sam Slike and Pamela Berman of Bloomsburg University are two of the most innovative instructors in the world. Dr. Skile and Berman use Wimba Classroom to provide college courses to deaf and hard-of-hearing students. Their innovative courses use a sign language interpreter broadcast through a webcam in conjunction with closed-captioning of spoken lecture material via Caption Colorado. Their work is so remarkable that in Summer 2008 they won the prestigious Excellence in Distance Learning award from the United States Distance Learning Association (USDLA).

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Reducing Sense of Isolation:

Southern State Community College

Southern State Community College

Southern State Community College relies on the Wimba Collaboration Suite to save gas, money, and time traveling, while better teaching and reaching its remote students. “We look at Wimba as a way to get us off the highways. We also use Wimba Classroom for conducting meetings and workshops. In the past, our faculty and staff had to travel quite a bit, but now we’ve moved many of our departmental workshops and meetings online with Wimba Classroom. We even use archives to construct minutes from these meetings."

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California State University, Chico

California State University, Chico

Cris Guenter of CSU, Chico knows how to teach. And in January 2008 she won the National Art Educator Award for her “exemplary contributions to the field of visual arts education.” Guenter is one of the world leaders when it comes to using Wimba to effectively teach online. She has been teaching live online with Wimba since 2000 to teach undergraduate and graduate students in Arts Education courses, Creativity Trends in Education, Arts Integration, and The Use of Computers in Instructional Media. Some of her classes meet face-to-face so she uses Wimba to complement her course material, while other classes of hers meet entirely online. But in both cases, she says her distance students excel specifically because she uses the Wimba Collaboration Suite.

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K12: Expanding Curriculum and Improving Outcomes:

blendedschools.net

blendedschools.net

“The Wimba software helps with interaction with students. I’ve found that students who are shy in the classroom or are kind of an introvert, they express themselves more via Wimba. It’s something all school districts should take advantage of.  Wimba bridges the gap when it comes to differentiated instruction because not everyone learns the same way.” In fact, though only three years young, the Cyber Academy has already offered more than 120 synchronous and asynchronous courses taught by state certified instructors from within the district and partner schools across Pennsylvania. “Wimba allows me to reach those students that otherwise we’d lose.”

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William Penn School District

William Penn School District

Blendedschools.net provides online technologies that small – and large – districts with shallow pockets cannot afford to purchase on their own. This purchasing power allows Blendedschools.net to buy large licenses of technologies such as Blackboard and Wimba which can then be distributed to any district that requests these technologies. Now, a small, rural school in the Appalachian Mountains can extend the breadth of its curriculum by allowing its students to take classes either asynchronously via Blackboard or fully live online with Wimba Classroom. “The Wimba tools are used in so many different ways to supplement so many different situations,” says Mark Gensimore, Project Manager of blendedschools.net.

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VLACS

VLACS

VLACS started using Wimba in 2008 to enable its instructors to better engage with students throughout the state. In less than a year, all of its 100+ teachers rely on Wimba Pronto to communicate instantly with more than 2,000 students in 54 courses, while many also teach live online via Wimba Classroom, with languages teachers even using Wimba Voice to help students learn languages of the world. All the while these same teachers take live online Professional Development (PD) seminars that are so collaborative and convenient that the school has been able to offer more seminars than ever before with a greater number of teachers attending.

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Magnolia Independent School District

Magnolia Independent School District

Teachers across MISD are finding Wimba Classroom to be useful for classes in different subjects. For example, one math teacher uses it with all six of her classes, while a high school BCIS teacher who has a student with a medical condition that leaves him homebound will soon allow the student to attend class virtually while the rest of his peers are in the physical classroom. After five years of slogging through the desktop/room video conferencing units, Brown and his TxDLA Board Chair – who worked for North Texas State University and had been using Wimba Classroom – began using Wimba Classroom for two board meetings a year, and it quickly seemed like a “viable option for Magnolia versus desktop/room video conferencing.” And once he received a demo from Wimba, “it was a no-brainer...and the price was right.”

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LEARN - Leading English Education and Resource Network

LEARN - Leading English Education and Resource Network

The distances between schools and administrators in the Quebec region are overcome with Wimba -- saving time, travel, and money.

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Kentucky Virtual Schools

Kentucky Virtual Schools

For years, both its professional development and academic courses were offered entirely asynchronously, based on the Blackboard course management system. However, students and teachers began asking for more collaborative tools in order to make the online curriculum come alive. Enter Wimba.

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Idaho Digital Learning Academy

Idaho Digital Learning Academy

Idaho saves thousands of dollars in travel time and man hours by training teachers via Wimba Classroom! 100% of Idaho regions participated in online meetings, saving $81,500 in mileage reimbursement costs, 97,000+ miles of travel, 4,850+ gallons of gasoline and 3,100 “out of office” hours eliminated.

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DeKalb Online Academy

DeKalb Online Academy

Whether a student wants to get ahead or just get caught up, the DeKalb OnLine Academy (DOLA) of Georgia’s DeKalb County School System can help. 35 teachers use Wimba on a daily basis to reach their students. With Wimba, both DOLA students and teachers can hold conversations, discussions, and ask and answer questions very similar to the way they do in a traditional classroom. DOLA teachers hold daily live synchronous chats while students use Wimba Classroom’s electronic whiteboard daily for presentations of content and for group collaboration. Students and teachers alike couldn’t be more pleased!

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Cobb County eSchool

Cobb County eSchool

The Wimba software is easy to use and therefore allows instructors of varying technological skills to implement it based on what they might need in order to reach all their students. These tools allow eHS instructors to set up private tutorials for students according to their schedules and availability.  The tools also help teachers to better convey to students more rigorous concepts that would otherwise be difficult to deliver. 

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Arctic Research Consortium of the United States (ARCUS)

Arctic Research Consortium of the United States (ARCUS)

Take the environmental wonders of the North and South Poles, add a mixture of teachers and research scientists, stir in a pinch of collaborative education software and what do you get? A recipe for science education that engages students like few things have done before. While in the field, PolarTREC teachers connect with their students, classrooms, and communities back home through the use of Internet tools including online journals, message boards, photo albums, podcasts, and other online learning resources. One of these resources, Wimba, helped bring several recent expeditions in the Arctic and Antarctic to life for students.

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Publishers:

Pearson Prentice Hall

Pearson Prentice Hall

For years, whether in a traditional language lab setting or in an online environment, there has been no integrated, practical way to ensure that students are doing oral practice in language courses. Thanks to Wimba, now there is.

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