Ten Online Courses You Won’t Believe

NEW YORK, NY–(EMWNews – July 29, 2008) – Under the category, “Who Knew?” comes Wimba’s

Modern Marvels. Wimba® Inc., the education technology company that helps

people teach people, today announced its inaugural list of the Top 10

Unique Online Courses, which utilize Wimba’s collaborative solutions.

10.) Hedge Your Bets with Casino Management: Students at The University of

Southern Mississippi hit the jackpot when they enrolled in a three credit

online Casino Resort Management course. The course provides students live

online access via Wimba Classroom™ to professional casino managers

including Michael Cray, Director of Table Games at the Isle of Capri

Casino, who guest lectures from the casino’s boardroom.

9.) COMMCERT — Dalhousie’s own “Canadian Idol”: Today’s MySpace generation

of students are all about multi-media and ‘putting it out there.’ That’s

why students flocked to professor Phil O’Hara’s extra credit course in

which they were asked to submit online presentations a la “American Idol”

— presenting everything from poetry readings to piano recitals. Unprepared

for the 200 students who signed up, O’Hara also assigned some students to

the roles of Simon, Paula and Randy to judge performances and used the

polling feature in Wimba Classroom for student to cast their votes. Some

notable performances include “The Witches” from “Macbeth,” “Who’s on First,

What’s on Second,” a bagpipe performance, and a display of bugs.

8.) Arctic Wildlife in Singapore: Students at the Singapore American School

studying Antarctic animals made life-size replicas of these animals, set up

their classroom like a museum, and then created their own podcasts with the

Podcasting feature of Wimba Voice™ to describe their displays. Their

parents came in later that evening and listened to their children’s

podcasts as they walked through the exhibits.

7.) Take A Minute for English: Reese M. Heitner teaches English as a Second

Language (ESL) at Drexel University, preparing his students — from across

the globe — for the TOEFL exam, an international test which verifies a

student’s proficiency in English speaking, reading, writing, and listening

skills. The test requires students to spontaneously produce speech samples

in response to a series of computer-prompted questions. By using Wimba

Voice, Heitner’s students are able to simulate the TOEFL test environment,

posting their speech samples within the pre-defined one-minute window

before the built-in timer runs out! It’s a one-of-a-kind way to allow

students to maximize their test preparation.

6.) Kindergarten — ALL Day Long: Kindergarten students in the Rose Tree

Media School District outside of Philadelphia no longer enjoy the luxury of

a half-day. Now, thanks to Wimba Classroom and Wimba Voice, they extend

their half-day program with a thematic online course as they learn 21st

century technology skills. Students play games and engage in other

learning activities to augment literacy, numeracy, technology, and science

standards. Sorry kids, naptime not allowed.

5.) Photography Around the World — With photography students based in

England, the United States, Turkey, Mozambique, Greece, Sweden and Italy,

University of the Arts London, London College of Communication — Europe’s

largest education centre for design, communication, and the arts — uses

Wimba Classroom to provide a collaborative and interactive Web 2.0 feel to

its online photography courses. Though students can’t take pictures of

their classmates on the other side of the globe, they can share

photographic techniques and annotate each other’s pictures in real-time.

4.) PolarTREC (Teachers and Researchers Exploring and Collaborating) —

Taking K-12 Students Into the Arctic Virtually: This program, run by the

Arctic Research Consortium of the U.S. (ARCUS) and funded by the National

Science Foundation, allows K-12 teachers to participate in polar research

as a pathway to improving science education. During their participation in

the program, PolarTREC teachers and researchers use the real-time chat and

audio features in Wimba Classroom to show slides and communicate with

classrooms and the public across the globe to present their research

directly from the Arctic and Antarctica during “Live from International

Polar Year (IPY)!” events.

3.) Learning English by Watching “Friends” and “Home Alone”: Megan Ritchie,

an instructor in the English Languages Program at the University of

Pennsylvania, puts TV and movie clips from YouTube into the Wimba Voice

presentation tool for her Vocabulary Development class. In one lesson, her

non-native English speaking students watch an airport scene from “Friends,”

in order to hear English travel terms like, delay, bump up, and first

class. In another lesson, students watch a clip from the movie “Home

Alone,” where the family races through an airport. It gives her students a

fun and practical way to practice speaking and listening to English.

2.) The Genographic Project — a Journey Through Humankind: This two-credit

course offered by Southern State Community College in Ohio is the only one

of its kind and is based on an unprecedented five-year research project

being conducted by National Geographic. It takes students on a landmark

study of the human journey — where we came from and how we got to where we

live today — through genetic and DNA analysis. A highlight of the course

is an online connection to Dr. Spencer Wells, scientist, geneticist, author

and documentary filmmaker, who is project director for the Genographic

Project at National Geographic. You can find more information about the

Genographic Project at www.nationalgeographic.com/genographic.

1.) History, Education and Guidance of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, and

Introduction to Instructional Methods for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing:

These award-winning online courses, offered by Bloomsburg University of

Pennsylvania, feature a sign-language interpreter and closed-caption text

to accompany slide presentations, as well as audio of lectures for hearing

students. These courses are prerequisites to the only graduate program in

Pennsylvania — and 70 in the nation — for training teachers of the deaf.

These online courses broaden access to students interested in this field.

“As online courses become a mainstream part of K-12 and higher education

offerings, faculty are recognizing that the sky is really the limit when it

comes to subject matter,” said Yancy Oshita, Chief Marketing Office and SVP

of Wimba. “Technology in education is really as transparent as it is in so

many other aspects of how people live — it is merely the vehicle to

provide greater flexibility and options for everything from shopping and

making travel arrangements, to teaching, communicating, and learning.”

The Wimba Collaboration Suite™ offers a rich array of collaborative

tools that allow faculty to retain the highly personal and lively nature of

traditional classroom instruction. Wimba solutions integrate seamlessly

within existing university course management systems/virtual learning

environments (CMS/VLE) such as ANGEL® Learning, Blackboard® and Moodle.

With this combination, Wimba offers institutions the flexibility they need

so that instructors never need a new username or password, and never have

to leave their familiar online course environments

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 [email protected].

Wimba. People Teach People. www.wimba.com