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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This summer, WizIQ announced that it was beginning development of a plugin for Instructure’s Canvas LMS. Canvas represented an open, elegant, state-of-the-art approach to cloud-based learning management and had just open sourced its core technologies and was a natural choice for our next turnkey integration. This development effort came to fruition at the 2011 EDUCAUSE Conference today when WizIQ announced the availability of its Instructure Canvas conference module. At the same time, Instructure announced its new partner program, with Cengage, Pearson, and WizIQ as launch partners.

WizIQ, as an Instructure Certified Partner, worked directly with Instructure engineers to ensure seamless integration of the WizIQ Virtual Classroom with Canvas. Available initially as part of Instructure’s hosted offerings, WizIQ’s plugin will also be added to the open source, Community version of Canvas soon.

Users of Instructure Canvas will be able to launch Virtual Classroom sessions directly from the Canvas LMS once they subscribe to a WizIQ organizational account. At a moment’s notice, instructors will be able to enter a class with students for virtual office hours, lesson capture, study sessions, creation of flipped classroom lessons, synchronous distance education classes, virtual whiteboard collaboration, and more. Students will immediately receive notification of the class through any of the communications channels supported by Canvas, ranging from email to Facebook.

Rockingham County Public Schools in North Carolina will be the first Instructure customer to begin using the plugin. Providing instruction to homebound students, offering homework help and evening tutoring, and conducting parent outreach are all on the table as they take a 1:1 laptop initiative forward in five of their high schools.

WizIQ looks forward to continuing an active partnership with Instructure in the months and years ahead, creating deeper integrations in Canvas and further contributing to this powerful open source project. WizIQ also looks forward to welcoming Instructure Canvas customers to the most cost-effective virtual classroom solution available, offering deep discounts through the end of November to school districts, colleges, and universities looking to add WizIQ Virtual Classroom to their Canvas deployments. Contact me (chris@wiziq.com) or your Instructure Account Manager to learn more. WizIQ CEO, Harman Singh, and I will also be at the upcoming CanvasCon and will be available to answer questions and discuss our Virtual Classroom with Canvas users.

Best regards,
Chris Dawson
VP, Business Development

Update: Here is the link to a recent press release: http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/instructure-canvas-users-can-now-access-wiziq-virtual-classroom-directly-from-within-1574910.htm

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