WizIQ Blog

The Des Moines Area Community Colleges to start using the WizIQ Virtual Classroom this fall

A few days ago we heard from the Des Moines Area Community Colleges (DMACC) that they will begin using the WizIQ Virtual Classroom this fall with a 150-room initial deployment. Community colleges are at the forefront of continuing and higher education and are absolutely key to expanding cost effective access to skills and knowledge nationwide.

As you might know, DMACC is one of the fastest growing community colleges in the country with over 700 faculty and serving over 70,000 students between its degree programs and extensive continuing education offerings. They offer online courses and small class sizes, experienced faculty, and innovative uses of technology. While they have campuses in and around Des Moines, Iowa, the communities they serve reach into very rural areas with long travel times to campus, making effective distance education much more important.

Chris Dawson, our Vice President of Business Development personally met Mark Steffen, the Director of Distance Learning for DMACC, who was thrilled with WizIQ. Mark said, “We were able to make WizIQ available to a significant percentage of our staff at a fraction the price of other virtual classroom solutions. We're going to be training our staff and then looking expand across the entire distance education faculty as we move to more synchronous course offerings."

We publicly announced this association a few days back. Here’s the press release: http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/-1558120.htm

We are really happy to be part of their continued push into high-quality, cost-effective learning, regardless of the distances involved for students and faculty. We want to thank all WizIQ members for extending your faith in us, which has empowered us to make collaborations like DMACC possible.

Flipped classrooms! Have you started yet?

The flipped classroom concept comes from top educators’ extensive study and experimentation. Let’s take a look at what flipping your classroom entails, and how the WizIQ Virtual Classroom helps you get the most out of this technique.

What are flipped classrooms?

Flipping your classroom involves reversing how you look at lectures and “homework.” With a flipped classroom approach, students listen to class lectures at home, typically as pre-recorded (asynchronous) video or audio modules along with doing their pre-class reading assignments.

Then, when they come to school, they do their “homework” in class. This approach gives students immediate access to both teachers and peers as they work through the material. It also allows the teacher to focus on facilitating learning in truly collaborative environments.

Why are flipped classrooms so popular?

Teachers adopting the flipped classroom approach love how much more interactive their student time becomes. No more talking at people, watching them zone out during “stand and deliver” lectures. Instead teachers get to spend their time teaching, by answering student questions and helping them apply their new knowledge to their homework.

Students enjoy getting immediate help when they get stuck, more chances for hands-on learning and in general are more engaged by doing something active rather than just sitting and listening.

How is the WizIQ Virtual Classroom an effective tool for flipping classrooms?

Today’s technologies make flipped classrooms a truly practical, yet innovative option. In particular, the WizIQ Virtual Classroom offers a number of benefits for both teachers and students.

Benefits for teachers

In the flipped classroom paradigm, WizIQ helps teachers get improved results from their students. Features that facilitate these improvements include:

• Creating and recording lectures in the WizIQ virtual classroom for asynchronous delivery
• Using the whiteboard tool for writing and drawing
• Using the advanced math, text and drawing tools
• Sharing a wide variety of content during your sessions, including word documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, slides, and YouTube videos

Teachers themselves benefit from the following WizIQ features:

• Organizing lecture content in your folders
• Getting student feedback and publishing it on your profile page
• Keeping students on your site by integrating the WizIQ Virtual Classroom with your LMS, CMS or website with our developer APIs

Though, remember that teachers can also deliver live, synchronous classes through WizIQ. Use the virtual classroom synchronously for:

• Taking student questions
• Guiding practice sessions
• Guiding lab time
• Etc.

Even better, you can record these sessions and distribute them amongst students for review, aiding those who missed class or want to review.

There are other side benefits as well. Imagine snow days no longer stopping classes. Instead, teacher and students can meet online!

Benefits for students

There are plenty of benefits to students in flipped classrooms when you choose WizIQ. They can:

• Download and learn from recorded lectures at their own pace and time, including features such as pause, rewind, watch again, and review.
• No more failure to complete homework that the student couldn’t finish without assistance, which is made worse when there’s no time to help the next day in class.
• Much more time to “do” than just listen, allowing teachers to better address different types of learners.

What’s more, teachers can encourage students to schedule their own virtual classroom sessions with classmates. Students can use these sessions to tutor one another, collaborate, review for exams, etc.

Parents can view the recordings as well, letting them better understand each teacher’s approach to particular concepts, or to refresh their own skills as they help their children study. The next time parents ask “What did you learn in school today?” their children can respond with “Watch the videos” instead of the typical “Nothin’.”

Interested in learning more? Request a demo to assess the WizIQ Virtual Classroom, and experiment with your own ideas around flipped classrooms. The e-teaching community will be delighted to hear your WizIQ flipped classroom approach and thoughts. We look forward to brainstorming and learning with you!

Why I flipped my classroom

Just launched - the new developers’ portal on WizIQ for easy virtual classroom integration in websites

We just opened a developer portal, from where website owners can integrate WizIQ Virtual Classroom in their websites, CMS/LMS systems using the WizIQ API.

WizIQ has supported web services for some time, allowing users to integrate the Virtual Classroom into any website or content management system that supports the education and training markets. New RESTful APIs are now fully documented on developer.wiziq.com. WizIQ will be providing more direct support through this site to users looking to leverage these APIs.

WizIQ will also be investing over the next several months in creating turnkey and/or well-documented integrations with such open source learning projects as Instructure Canvas, openLMS, Centre SIS, and openSIS. These solutions will become available on developer.wiziq.com and will complement our existing Moodle module, Building Block for the Blackboard LearnTM platform, as well as plugins for proprietary systems.

WizIQ's Virtual Classroom enables organizations, teachers and learners to connect live from anywhere, offering real-time collaboration and communication.

The WizIQ Virtual Classroom features include:

• Activities from your own website - schedule, manage and conduct live classes
• Live online classes to small or large number of attendees simultaneously
• Attendance report
• Co-brand WizIQ Virtual Classroom with your logo
• Multi-way audio (any number of attendees can speak at the same time)
• 4 live video streams
• Text chat
• Advance Whiteboard tool
• Content sharing (DOCX, PPT, XLSX, PDF, Videos, etc.)
• Recording and archiving - all classes are recorded for review
• Support available for seamless integration
• Get simple pricing plan that suits your need

For a complete developer’s guide, visit http://developer.wiziq.com/overview

WizIQ Launches Virtual Classroom Building Block for Blackboard Learn (TM)

Building Blocks^® is Blackboard's open architecture project. WizIQ has developed a new Blackboard Building Block to give synchronous, live classes using WizIQ Virtual Classroom, directly from the Blackboard Learn platform.

The WizIQ Virtual Classroom Building Block allows users of the Blackboard Learn^TM platform to schedule and launch live classes, view attendance reports, and view recordings by simply clicking on the links in their Blackboard Learn accounts. The WizIQ Virtual Classroom Blackboard Building Block works with Blackboard Learn 9.0 and 9.1.

The WizIQ Virtual Classroom Blackboard Building Block features include:

• Quick download, deployment, and configuration in just a few minutes
• WizIQ Virtual Classroom can be accessed without additional authentication or duplication of user databases
• Teachers, instructors, moderators, and course builders can schedule and manage classes, enter live classes, view attendance report and past class recordings from within Blackboard Learn platform.
• Advanced communication features such as web camera sharing, VoIP audio  communications, text chat and even screen and application sharing across computing platforms are available for real-time collaboration
• Instructors can share PDF, Word documents, Excel sheets, YouTube videos from inside the WizIQ Virtual Classroom with all users in the course
• Advanced Whiteboard tools built into WizIQ Virtual Classroom like drawing, math tool, etc., are available for better learning experience
• Instructors can allow students to use microphone, web camera, or write on the whiteboard

WizIQ Virtual Classroom Building Block for Blackboard Learn^TM platform integration

WizIQ Virtual Classroom Building Block provides a nicely integrated workflow with Blackboard Learn platform. The close integration of WizIQ’s virtual classroom Building Block with Blackboard Learn platform frees teachers to focus on their content instead of the technology. This integration provides a way for Blackboard Learn™ administrators to easily install and configure the WizIQ Virtual Classroom Blackboard Building Block; allow teachers, instructors, moderators and course builders to schedule classes as part of their course offering; and students to enter live classes and view past class recordings.

For comprehensive information on prerequisites, installation, configuration and integration, please visit http://www.wiziq.com/vcplugin/

WizIQ Virtual Classroom Blackboard Building Block for instructors

WizIQ Virtual Classroom Building Block for Blackboard Learn platform provides instructors with a highly organized interface to schedule and manage classes. For each course, instructors, teaching assistants, course builders, and/or graders can schedule, conduct, manage and record live classes. Furthermore, classes are made available to all students registered in that course.

Schedule live classes

Here are some simple steps to schedule a class:

• Define the class name, the start date and time, duration of class and description about the class in the class Schedule form (You can edit the class information any time)
• Choose to record a class or not
• Login to Blackboard Learn platform and click the Courses tab
• Select the course from the course listing
• Click Course Tools and select WizIQ Virtual Classroom Building Block from from Blackboard Learn’s Control Panel
• Fill the schedule class form and click the Submit button

Manage classes

Once classes are scheduled, they get listed in Live and Upcoming Classes and also appear in the instructor’s My Calendar.

Here is how you can manage your classes:

• View the complete list of current, upcoming and past classes on WizIQ Virtual Classroom home page
• Edit class details, or cancel the upcoming classes
• Join the class by simply clicking on that class’s title. Your students can also join the class in the same way (Attendees are not required to enter their usernames or passwords for the class, as they are pre-authenticated from the Blackboard Learn platform)
• View the attendance report including details like, attendee name, exact duration of attendance, etc., after the completion of the class
• View the recordings any time

WizIQ Virtual Classroom for students

Here is what students can do:

• View class listings and class details, and enter live classes
• Access recordings of past classes from WizIQ’s virtual classroom
• Access upcoming classes directly from the list of Live and Upcoming classes and it’s course calendar

To join a live class or view a recording, students can simply click on the class title and WizIQ Virtual Classroom is launched. Students are not required to enter a username or a password for the class as they are pre-authenticated by the Blackboard Learn^TM platform.

Once the live class is over, students can access recordings at any time.

Again, the complete guide is available in a print-friendly PDF format when you sign up here on WizIQ.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Schedule the same class multiple times - recurring class feature launched on WizIQ

Just launched on WizIQ: Schedule recurring classes. Teachers can save time by creating an entire, recurring series of the same class taught live, multiple times at regular intervals with the same (or even different) set of attendees. No more recreating the same class over and over for regular meetings!

Here are the highlights:

• Schedule a complete recurring series as per your preferred interval with advanced customization options
• Schedule a complete recurring series for up to 12 months in advance from the current date (the date on which you schedule the class series)
• Invite students to attend individual classes of the recurring series
• Change date and time of a single class in a series of recurring classes
• Cancel a single class in a series of recurring class. (However, cancellation of the complete recurring series is not possible)
• Add recurring series to your courses while scheduling
• Add recurring series to your courses from the class listing

Here are some benefits of scheduling a recurring class:

• The feature is useful when you plan to teach the same class multiple times. You can schedule the recurring class at one go without the need to schedule every time you plan to offer the same class.
• By scheduling a recurring class, your learners will know the date and time well in advance, so they can plan and attend at their convenience.
• You can add a series of recurring classes to your courses, as well as creating standalone recurring classes.

Examples:

 


To schedule a recurring class, you need to click on the ‘Want to schedule a recurring class’ link as shown in the image above. Now you can schedule a recurring class by selecting required options as shown in the image below.

Note: Currently, the recurring class feature is available for premium members only. We will be making this feature available for premium organizations and academic users soon.

For more information on the recurring class feature, please visit our help section

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Annual Edu Conference - Connecting Online 2011 (CO2011) - February 4-6, 2011

Welcome to the annual Connecting Online 2011 (CO11), live online conference. You are cordially invited to participate at the live online conference starting from the 4th of February to the 6th of February, 2011.

Educators at all levels will find this conference very useful, as many eminent intellectuals from across the globe will be holding webinars (web based seminars) on a variety of topics that help you understand:

• The importance of integrating technology into traditional classroom teaching
• Social networking, digital learning and best practices
• Moodle and other APIs that augment existing LMSs (Learning Management Systems)
• Challenges that educators, administrators, students, and community members face in online learning/teaching
• Independent e-learning strategies, etc.

This is a rare event and happens only once a year. This event is not only useful to educators, but also to administrators, students, and community members. So, we suggest that you do not miss CO11. Register for the webinars by clicking the title links below: