DE Oracle @ UMUC

Pedagogical Usage of Wimba

Joanna (Xuan) Zhang

Instructional Support Specialist

Center for Support of Instruction

Published: March-April 2009

Category: » Online-pedagogy » Synchronous-communication

As a UMUC faculty member, you might have heard about Wimba and that it is now available at UMUC. If you haven't yet attended the Center for Teaching and Learning's Wimba Workshop session, you might be curious about Wimba and how it can be used for online teaching and learning. This article will help you understand more about what Wimba is and explain some of the uses for Wimba tools.

What is Wimba?

Wimba is a suite of online communication tools that enhance communication, collaboration, and interactivity, especially in distance education. Wimba applications allow instructors to easily incorporate audio and visual components into online teaching and learning in both synchronous and asynchronous ways. The product suite adopted by UMUC includes Wimba Classroom and a set of Wimba Voice Tools.

Wimba Classroom is a real-time virtual classroom environment with features that include audio/video, application sharing, content display, polling, whiteboarding, text chat, and more. It allows faculty to use a virtual classroom to broadcast live lectures, hold online meetings, and arrange various teaching/learning activities such as office hours, tutoring, team projects, guest speakers, etc.

An archived Wimba Classroom session.

Wimba Voice Tools includes a set of audio communication applications including Voice Board, Voice Direct, Voice Email, Voice Presentation, Voice Recorder, and Podcaster. A major benefit of these tools is that the recorded messages can easily be embedded into the Conferences area of the WebTycho classroom. The following list provides an overview about what feature(s) each tool offers:

• Voice Email enables e-mail communication with integrated voice messages.

• Voice Board is a threaded, audio-based discussion board. It allows faculty and students to post and listen to voice messages within discussion boards.

• Voice Direct enables synchronous communication in audio- and text-based formats, and the sessions can be archived. 

• Voice Presentation allows faculty and students to present Web content along with voice messages. It's especially useful for touring Web sites.

• Podcaster enables faculty to easily create and distribute podcasts for subscription. It could be used for creating mini lectures that students can listen to on the go. 

• Voice Recorder is an audio recording application for one-way communication from the faculty to the student.

Educational Uses

The Brown Bag sessions hosted by the Wimba organization are webinars that are open to a number of higher education institutions. The session attendees and Wimba representatives share their experiences and tips for implementing Wimba. The information shared below documents some tips and experiences from these Wimba webinar sessions to provide you with creative ideas for the pedagogical uses of Wimba tools.

Lectures and Archived Lectures

One of the major uses of Wimba is to produce and broadcast live and recorded lectures and interactive sessions. These sessions can be accessed both synchronously and asynchronously to enhance learning at a distance. At the University of North Texas, a library sciences faculty member provides pre-recordings of live lectures and other faculty-student interactive sessions. Students who have attended the live sessions are able to use the pre-recordings to review the topic, and students who miss the live sessions can access the archived versions. An advantage of using Wimba to record live sessions is that faculty can repeatedly use the archived session every semester for all the course sections. By reviewing the pre-recorded sessions, students have the opportunity to watch live sessions of other students communicating with faculty. Many of their questions will be answered by reviewing prerecorded sessions. At Northern Illinois University, some faculty who teach hybrid classes use Wimba to replace the in-class lecture time with pre-recorded virtual lectures. In this way, faculty can reserve their face-to-face time for assignment discussion. 

In another case, an engineering degree program used Wimba lectures to meet the special needs of its overseas students. Specifically, the college offers a hybrid learning program to its students in Taiwan. In addition to the 13-hour face-to-face sessions, the overseas students wanted more synchronous communication with faculty. To satisfy student needs, the faculty decided to present lectures through Wimba synchronously to replace the asynchronous modules offered in their Blackboard-delivered course. The overseas students seemed to prefer Wimba Classroom, and they especially valued the video component that Wimba provides. They expressed that using video helped them to identify more and feel a greater connection with the instructor. It was also reported that the archived lectures were frequently viewed by students, which would not have been possible with a traditional face-to-face lecture. Another benefit is that instructors can track how many students review archived sessions.

Another use of Wimba is to provide guest speaker sessions that can easily be facilitated and offered through the use of Wimba tools. An instructor can invite non-local guest speakers to make virtual presentations through Wimba without the hassle of travel, time, and costs that are required for face-to-face sessions.

Language Learning

Many institutions have incorporated Wimba into their language and speech classes because Wimba provides the audio/video component and asynchronous communication mode that makes it a creative solution to online teaching and learning of languages and speech classes. A faculty member from Boston College used Voice Email for mid-term exams in a Romance language class. The faculty asked students to review online video clips before responding to questions sent by the faculty with Voice Email. To complete the exam, students were required to respond to the faculty via Voice Email by a specified deadline. 

For another assignment, faculty asked students to make presentations in Wimba Classroom to practice their speech skills. At Dickinson State University, speech sessions were recorded and archived using Wimba Classroom so that faculty could evaluate students' speech performance at a distance.

Online language classes at SUNY-Jefferson used Wimba Voice Board for classroom discussions. One of the advantages of Voice Board is that it gives students the opportunity to interact, practice languages, and collaborate by using asynchronous audio- and text-based threaded discussions. This is a nice enhancement compared to the traditional, pure text-based online discussion board.

Wimba tools are also convenient for one-on-one tutoring or foreign language conversational practice sessions. A foreign language instructor from Estrella Mountain Community College arranged conversation practice sessions so that students could listen to authentic pronunciation of foreign languages and practice the language verbally along with the instructor. The faculty member was also able to provide feedback to the students in an audio format. Another faculty member from Northern Illinois University provided a creative solution for her "penpal" groups—using Wimba tools for communication between students in the U.S. and China.

How-to Sessions

With the application sharing feature of Wimba Classroom, it's relatively easy for instructors to demonstrate how to use a particular software application. An anthropology professor taught his students how to use SPSS software by using Wimba Classroom's application sharing feature. This feature allows instructors to share how-to instructions in real time to their online student audience. These live classroom sessions can be recorded and archived for students to review again and again. In another example, an instructor at North Dakota University provided archived how-to demos explaining technical software usage to enhance students' self-paced learning.

Faculty-Student Communication

Many presenters in the webinars reported that Wimba greatly enhanced communication between faculty and students. Faculty participants explained how they use Voice Email as an easy-to-use tool that makes communicating with their online students more personal.

Another popular use of Wimba tools is to communicate with students during office hours. According to a presenter from Tulsa Community College (TCC), using Wimba for office hours helped faculty connect with online students and helped to establish more faculty presence in their distance classes.

Other faculty at TCC said that they use Wimba Classroom to offer orientations for classes at the beginning of each semester. Wimba Classroom offers audio and video opportunities for students to learn course structure and navigation of the online environment at the beginning of the class. It's especially convenient when using Wimba Classroom synchronously because students can ask questions and get an immediate response. Similarly, faculty in the nursing program at Northern Illinois University hosted orientation sessions through Wimba before their students entered the internship program.

Online Collaboration

Last but not least, Wimba enables online collaboration to occur easily. With Wimba, students may organize team meetings and continue discussions outside the regular classroom. Several presenters reported that their online faculty asked students to collaborate on their team projects or make online group presentations through Wimba.

Summary

Overall, the Wimba suite has a variety of pedagogical uses. The above-mentioned examples are just a few of them. You may want to experience the full capabilities of the product suite and the educational possibilities it presents for distance educators.

If you would like further information about Wimba products, you can visit Wimba's Web site. If you want to attend the Wimba Workshop offered by the Center for Teaching and Learning, get in touch with the director of your program for information on how to apply for the faculty training.