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Wimba Enhances Integration With Moodle
Combined Solution Expands Access and Flexibility for K-20 Community
October 28, 2008 --
ORLANDO, FL -- (Marketwire) -- 10/28/08 -- EDUCAUSE 2008 Annual Conference -- Wimba® Inc., the education technology company that helps people teach people, announced today an enhanced integration with Moodle, a free, Open Source course management system. Through this new integration, teachers and professors can more easily incorporate the Wimba Collaboration Suite(TM) into the Moodle platform to facilitate the use of online video, voice, text, application sharing, polling and white boarding. The combined functionality contributes to a highly collaborative, interactive learning environment -- factors that significantly help increase student engagement and retention.
The K-20 community has steadily increased its interest in the Open Source movement resulting in wide adoption of Moodle, particularly among K-12 schools and districts where budgets are often tight. There are currently more than 2.5 million courses delivered through Moodle, many offered at schools and higher education institutions using Wimba including:
-- Athabasca University, Canada's Open University -- City College of San Francisco, CA -- Concordia College, MN -- Hawaii Department of Education, HI -- International Baccalaureate Organization -- The London School of Economics, London, England -- Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland -- San Mateo College, CA -- St. Patrick's College, Dublin, Ireland
"All our Wimba-enabled courses have some element of face-to-face and Moodle scaffolding," said John Smith, Director of Online Learning at St. Patrick's College in Ireland. "The integration of Wimba into our Moodle deployment has made life much easier, both administratively and pedagogically."
Wimba invests heavily in robust integrations between the Wimba Collaboration Suite and leading course management systems like Moodle because seamless integration means seamless collaboration. Students and faculty access the Wimba Collaboration Suite in the same way they would access any other tool within Moodle and have a single sign-on -- no additional usernames, passwords, or URLs required. Moodle administrators also save time because student and faculty accounts are automatically created within the Moodle integration.
Benefits of the enhanced Moodle 3.3 Module Integration include:
-- A more intuitive workflow for instructors to add Wimba Voice(TM) activities to courses; -- A new voice mail feature allowing students and instructors to send vocal e-mails for homework submissions, course notifications and more personal communications; -- The ability to add components of Wimba Voice -- Voice Boards, Voice E- mails, Voice Podcaster and Voice Presentations -- to Moodle courses as blocks or individual activities. -- Integration with the Moodle 1.9 WYSIWYG editor, enabling faculty to enhance course content with voice recordings anywhere the WYSIWIG editor is utilized.
"Through this new integration with Moodle we aim to help educators enhance teaching and learning, no matter what platform they use," said Steve Kann, Co-Founder and Senior Vice President of Engineering at Wimba. "We are committed to helping academic institutions provide rich, collaborative experiences and we believe this upgrade with Moodle is a testament to that."
About Moodle
Moodle is a software package for producing internet-based courses and web sites. It is a worldwide, ongoing development project designed to support a social constructionist framework of education. Moodle is provided freely as Open Source software (under GNU Public License).
About Wimba
Wimba®, Inc. 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 learning management systems with many of the proven disciplines of in-person learning environments. Wimba's intuitive solutions enable teachers 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 content, and more. Teachers can also use Wimba solutions to easily convert Microsoft Word documents into online content and to create and administer tests, quizzes, and exams. Our focus on education and collaboration with educators fuels our product development. For more information, please visit www.wimba.com or send an email to info@wimba.com.
Wimba. People Teach People. www.wimba.com
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Media Contact(s)
Kathleen Matthews
Wimba, Inc.
+1.646.861.5193
kmatthews@wimba.com
Melissa Chotiner
DBC PR+New Media
+1.202.292.4572
melissa@dbcpr.com
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