New York, NY (USA)/Cambridge (UK), January 2009 - Wimba has announced that the International Virtual Dental School (IVIDENT) has licensed Wimba Classroom™ for its global, online dental training program. IVIDENT aims to bridge the gap between skills development for dentists and the availability of expert teachers, particularly in specialised niche fields of training.
IVIDENT - led by King's College London's Dental Institute - is a multi-million pound, three-year project jointly funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England and the Department of Health that supports the complete dental education cycle through an innovative flexible learning platform. It aims to address shortages in teaching staff in the smaller specialties and includes the implementation of an elective capability for fifth-year dental students who travel abroad.
"Access to online dental education and training has been invaluable to our college and students", said Dr. Patricia Reynolds, Professor of Dental Education and Director of Flexible Learning at King's College London Dental Institute.
"IVIDENT is working with its five partners in the UK to address the challenge of succession of specialised teachers and to ensure continued high-quality training for students across the UK and beyond. Wimba's technology is enabling us to add an important collaboration and presentation tool to IVIDENT's own suite. Wimba has already been used to facilitate international meetings and lectures."
"The IVIDENT programme is significantly changing dental education, enabling broader and deeper access to training for students around the globe", said Yancy Oshita, Wimba's Executive Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing. "We are pleased that our technology is part of such an important step in improving oral healthcare education and applaud the efforts of all who have developed this innovative program."
Wimba Classroom is part of the Wimba Collaboration Suite™, which offers a rich array of collaborative applications that allow faculty to retain the highly personal and dynamic nature of traditional classroom instruction by facilitating the use of online video, voice, instant messaging, content authoring, application sharing, and white boarding, while also seamlessly integrating with a college or university's existing course-management systems/virtual learning environments (CMS/VLE) such as BlackboardÒ and Moodle.
With this combination, Wimba offers institutions the flexibility they need so that instructors can manage their course content and create customised rooms from within their familiar CMS/VLE environment.
