Wimba: Interactive Web Conferencing and electronic-seminar software.

Wimba is quickly becoming the most exciting and important public education tool in the state of Utah.  Recently the Utah Education network (UEN) signed a multi-year contract to bring Wimba licenses to all Public Higher Education Institutions, and to all Public K12 Teachers and School Districts.
 
Wimba is an online web 2.0 type of integrated solution (also known as a thin client) that allows users to login to an interactive virtual classroom using a web-browser.  The classrooms can be customized to a degree but the main features are:
 
  1. A main window pane for uploading presentation slides, images or interactive/shared whiteboard tools.  Allowing presentors/teachers & students to collaboratively interact, teach and deliver content to one another.
  2. Application sharing.  Allows users to collaborate on documents or demonstrate a software and other computer driven tools remotely.
  3. Multi-way audio & video:  This allows for audio and video collaboration, discussion and presentation to occur over long distances which in beneficial in many ways:
    1. Rural Education
    2. Graduate Studies while employed full-time
    3. Content delivery to sick/incompacitated students
    4. State Professional Development (travel and time savings)
    5. Meetings
    6. Office Hours
    7. Guest Lecturers
  4. Classroom and personalized chat which allows for side discussion and private discussion between presenters and pupils.
There are many other features such as Session Archiving, Instant Yes/No for Feedback, On the Fly Polling, Presenter Promotion, Breakout rooms and much more.  
 
Wimba seems to bring back the human element to distance education by providing a more personal approach.  WIMBA is very easy to start up, and easy to use for the educator and the student.
 
Contributed by Tom Johnson
 
 
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Disclaimer

Any opinions expressed here, except as specifically noted, are those of the individual authors or commenters and do not necessarily represent the views or policies of the Department of Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences, the Emma Eccles Jones College of Education and Human Services, or Utah State University.