North Dakota University System and Wimba Provide Collaborative Education Software to 11 North Dakota Universities

NEW YORK, NY and GRAND FORKS, ND--(Marketwire - July 8, 2008) - Wimba®, Inc., the education technology company that helps people teach people, today announced that the North Dakota University System (NDUS) has selected the Wimba Collaboration Suite™ to facilitate online instruction at all 11 public universities in the state. The Wimba Collaboration Suite will help these schools enhance learning, improve outcomes, and increase retention rates.

The NDUS will leverage Wimba to extend video to the desktops of its system's thousands of faculty and students. In addition to seeing their instructors and classmates live online via video in Wimba Classroom™, students will be able to interact via voice with Wimba Voice™, via instant messaging and voice with Wimba Pronto™, and with their course notes with Wimba Create™.

After evaluating several traditional web conferencing providers, Wimba's ability to integrate with course management systems and offer unlimited usage and storage made it "crystal clear" to the university system that Wimba was the right solution provider for the job.

"We were looking for an online desktop tool that would provide synchronous voice, video, and data collaboration; some kind of solution to give all our faculty and students the opportunity to take classes at their desktop," said Jerry Rostad, Director of the North Dakota Interactive Video Network and Wimba Project Manager. "Other main attractions to Wimba were pricing and scalability -- we are able to deploy Wimba to all 11 institutions in the university system while at the same time, allowing each to maintain its own unique branding and identities."

"The team at North Dakota has a unique understanding of how to disseminate technologies across many campuses, and we purposely allow our software to scale to accommodate customers just like them," says Yancy Oshita, Chief Marketing Officer and Senior Vice President of Wimba. "The NDUS staff routinely addresses the concerns, challenges, and preferences of faculty throughout the state. We are pleased that Wimba's Collaboration Suite offers both innovative and effective solutions that will play a central role in enhancing the teaching capabilities of North Dakota's universities."

"The thing we've already noticed is how the Wimba tools are being adopted," Rostad says. "For some, Wimba Classroom fits an educational need while for others, it might be Wimba Voice or Wimba Pronto. In short, Wimba can be employed in different locations and different departments for so many different uses."

About Wimba

Wimba, Inc. is a leading provider of collaborative learning software applications and services to the education industry. Our collaborative software applications for the online and blended education market enable institutions to bridge technology and pedagogy by supplementing course management systems with many of the proven disciplines of in-person learning environments. Wimba's intuitive solutions enable educators and students to quickly and easily teach and learn live online, engage in live chat and instant message exchanges, benefit from oral content being added to text-based course content, and more. Instructors can also use Wimba solutions to easily convert Microsoft Word documents into online course content and to create and administer tests, quizzes, and exams. Our focus on education and collaboration with educators fuels our product development.

Wimba. People Teach People. www.wimba.com

Contact Information: Wimba PR Contact Melissa Chotiner DBC Public Relations +1.202.292.4572 Melissa@dbcpr.com