This course, like others I have taken at JHU, encourages us and provides an opportunity to explore. Most of us rarely get the opportunity or time to research and investigate all the new technologies that are presented almost on a daily basis. I selected the Wimba platform to research and review because I had beta tested this tool in the spring 2009 as a resource for providing training outside of normal business hours. The e-platforms assignment gave me to opportunity to report my findings and document how to use this resource. At my college they currently only use this resource for a select few online faculty and they use it only from within the Blackboard LMS. I really wanted the opportunity to return to this platform from outside of the LMS and investigate it further.
The wonderful thing is, I will use this as one of the components of the Professional Development initiative I am developing for my final project. This provided the opportunity to decide when and where I would use Wimba. It also gave me the opportunity to investigate several free resources that do the same thing as Wimba. Dimdim and Vyew are two that I really like. Each is a valuable free resource that I will also use as part of my final project.
This course has really driven home the importance of communication on elearning communities. These types of resources make that not only easy but convenient.
