Wimba to Expand Possibilities at FE Institution

Wimba, the education technology company that helps people teach people, announced that an additional Further Education institution in the United Kingdom has become a user of Wimba’s full suite of innovative education technologies.

City College Norwich recently adopted The Wimba Collaboration Suite, integrated with their VLE, to help increase student engagement, enhance learning and increase retention, along with other recent Wimba clients:

• University of the West of England
• Birmingham City University
• University of Leeds
• University of Sheffield
• University of Birmingham
• University of Bristol

“We look forward to supporting each of these institutions as they enhance the online learning experiences of their students and instructors,” said Wimba Chief Executive Officer Tommaso Trionfi. “Our solutions and international reach enable instructors globally to interact with students in ways that could not occur in a text-based course.”

We spoke with Chris Boon, Senior ILT Support Analyst, City College Norwich, about their recent adoption of the Wimba Collaboration Suite:

“The Wimba Collaboration Suite has great potential to simplify the way our staff create engaging materials in Blackboard, as well as expand the possibilities beyond simple course handouts.

Wimba Voice will mean the creation of sound clips within Blackboard courses will now be considerably easier, avoiding the need to use other software packages to record the files. The tools will also extend the range of possibilities beyond simple sound clips, with the Voice Board in particular having great potential for language courses.

Wimba Create (Course Genie) will allow our staff to create attractive and interactive course materials for our students with only a small training overhead. We are keen to move our use of Blackboard beyond simply a means of distributing documents, and we believe Wimba Create will be a vital tool in this process.

Finally, Wimba Classroom should provide a platform for those involved with Distance or Work-Based Learning to arrange regular ‘virtual’ meetings, or for lecturers to organise drop-in tutorials for all students, independent of their physical location.

We are very excited about how they can take City College’s use of Blackboard to the next level.”

About Wimba: 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 web pages and to create and administer tests, quizzes, and exams. Our focus on education and collaboration with educators fuels our product