By Chris Higgins

For this academic year, the university’s Enterprise Learning Management System (ELMS) has improved to help “enhance learning for Maryland students.” Some of the enhancements are new tools that allow for synchronous voice and video communication with your students.

Wimba Live Classrooms (www.otal.umd.edu/wimba/wimbastudents/index.html) supports a real-time virtual classroom environment designed for distance education and collaboration. It supports audio, video application sharing, content display, and whiteboarding.

Wimba Voice Tools are Web-based tools that facilitate and promote vocal instruction, collaboration, coaching, and assessment. The voice tools include voice enhanced e-mail and a threaded discussion board with integrated voice recording and playback. These tools can increase the student interaction and engagement level of any online class by allowing faculty and students to easily embed vocal interactions into ELMS. You can find these features under the tools menu on the left navigation bar of your course.

Also new this year is the availability of organization spaces that can be used for research groups, committees, student organizations, and more. To request an organization space, you can go through the same request process as you do for a course. Get started at https://learningonline.umd.edu/elms-mgmt/.

Additional ELMS upgrades are planned for winter break. Here are some of the improvements you can expect:

• Better search tools in the content collection.
• The ability to move electronic documents in the content collection without breaking links.
• Improved discussion groups where you can act on information more quickly and navigate more efficiently.
• Right-to-left language packs will display in right-to-left format, the first being Arabic.

ELMS support staff will continue to update the ELMS Web site with information about any new tools or features that are being added. For more information, visit www.elms.umd.edu.