It’s been a long time coming, but the WizIQ Virtual Classroom is finally available as an official plug in to the Instructure Canvas LMS. We announced at EDUCAUSE that we were among Instructure’s launch partners for their new partner program. Several code iterations, a total virtual classroom upgrade, and a few months later we’re finally here.

WizIQ Virtual Classroom is now available through the conferencing module of Canvas, allowing impromptu tutoring sessions, meetings, virtual office hours, and on online classes with just a few clicks. The Virtual Classroom went into beta testing on Canvas early last month and entered production as part of Instructure’s scheduled February release.

To use WizIQ in Canvas…

Your school or organization needs a WizIQ account and a Canvas instance, either the open source community edition or the Instructure-hosted software. Open source users can configure the plug in once they start their 30-day free trial of WizIQ. Users running the hosted version can either contact WizIQ sales (sales@wiziq.com) or their Instructure account managers for more details (Instructure configures all of their plugins individually for customers).

Try before you buy!!

Our sales and support teams would be happy to arrange a demo of WizIQ within Instructure Canvas and provide quotes based on the number of teachers and classroom participants your school expects to deploy (don’t worry, it’s just as cost-effective as ever and even here, that 30-day free trial is always available so that you can see for yourself what a full-blown classroom-in-the-cloud can do for you and your students. You’re already using a state of the art LMS – why not add a state of the art synchronous meeting solution, as well?

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The last 10 days have been a bit, well, busy, to put it mildly. Last week was absorbed by EDUCAUSE, Harman (our company’s CEO) then joined me up here in Massachusetts for some marathon meetings and a critical look at our progress and business plan (long story short, 2012 is shaping up to be an incredibly exciting year with new directions and enhancements to our virtual classroom that you’ll need to see to believe), and now Harman and I will be in Washington on Thursday for Instructure’s CanvasCon user conference. I must say, TGIF will have much deeper significance than usual in 2 days.

In fact, I’m leaving for the airport at 3:30 Thursday morning, so this isn’t going to be a particularly long post. I suppose at least a nap is in order if I’d like to form coherent sentences when I’m telling Canvas users about WizIQ tomorrow. My boss will be there, after all, and he’d probably frown on me slurring my words before lunchtime.

Regardless of my need to catch a few winks, though, I can’t help but be excited to meet many of the early adopters of Instructure’s LMS. I wrote about Canvas early this year on ZDNet shortly before I joined WizIQ, talking about Instructure’s move to open source the software which didn’t look like any LMS I’d ever used (that’s not a bad thing, by the way). That move catapulted Instructure into all sorts of good places (like a hefty first round of venture capital) and only 9 months later, I have a chance to talk with Canvas users about our new WizIQ Virtual Classroom plugin for the LMS.

Pretty cool, if I do say so myself. What was that line from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Hopefully at least a few of you will be at CanvasCon – I hear they’re having a great lunch! Oh, right, and we can talk about where WizIQ fits into their LMS, too.

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