-- Instant Access to Campus Services: Institutions can bring services
online in real-time including the IT Department, Registrar, Financial Aid
office, and Library to create a 21st-century campus for the 21st-century
student.
-- Queued Chat for Tutoring and Office Hours: Teachers can control the IM
environment to enable a focused setting in which students "line up" for
individualized help.
-- Automatic Population of Classmates and Courses: Students' contact
lists are automatically populated with their courses and classmates to
facilitate and expand collaboration.
-- Application Sharing: Students can share any application on their
desktop in real-time with their classmates and teachers.
-- Blended Audio and Video Conferencing: Students and teachers can
interact in a group setting using their preferred media; whether that be
just audio or Wimba's follow-the-speaker video.
Wimba Pronto in Pilot
Ivy Tech Community College, the nation's largest statewide community
college with single accreditation, piloted Wimba Pronto in December.
Serving more than 111,000 students across 23 campuses, Ivy Tech regularly
relies on technology to enhance connections among its diverse, dispersed
student community.
"We launched Wimba Pronto with about 5,000 users," said Kara Monroe,
Executive Director of the Center for Instructional Technology at Ivy Tech.
"The launch was extremely successful and now Pronto is available to all
users. We expected students would love it, but found that instructors did
as well. Many faculty use Pronto for online office hours as well as general
conversations with students outside of normal class time."
The University of Missouri-St. Louis piloted Wimba Pronto in January and
will roll it out across campus this spring.
"The mission of our university is to develop a community with our students,
faculty and staff," said Marcel Bechtoldt, system administrator for
Technology Services at UM-St. Louis. "Wimba Pronto has the potential to
have a big impact on campus community allowing us to communicate online, to
share our academic interest and cultural diversity."
Wimba Pronto seamlessly integrates with the Blackboard Enterprise Learning
System™ and Moodle. Conference attendees will be able to experience a
hands-on demonstration of the new Pronto in the exhibit hall at Wimba
Connect 2008. For more information on Wimba Pronto, please visit
www.wimba.com/products/wimbapronto/
About Wimba
Wimba is a leading provider of collaborative learning software applications
and services to the education industry. Our collaborative software
applications for the online and blended education market enable
institutions to bridge technology and pedagogy by supplementing course
management systems with many of the proven disciplines of in-person
learning environments. Wimba's intuitive solutions enable educators and
students to quickly and easily teach and learn live online, engage in live
chat and instant message exchanges, benefit from oral content being added
to text-based course content, and more. Instructors can also use Wimba
solutions to convert Microsoft Word documents into accessible course
content and to create and administer tests, quizzes, and exams. Our focus
on education and collaboration with educators fuels our product
development.
Wimba. People Teach People. www.wimba.com
(1) The 2007 Educause Center for Applied Research (ECAR) Study of
Undergraduate Students and Information Technology
Contact Information: Wimba PR Contact Melissa Chotiner DBC Public Relations +1.202.292.4572 Melissa@dbcpr.com