11103

11103

General Session - Conference Presentation Only (no formal paper)

WiZiQ: an alternative free tool for teaching and learning
Hery The, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, USA, hery@hawaii.edu

As a graduate student in the field of Educational Technology, I have to explore and experience with the tools that can benefit me on improving teaching and learning quality. One of my interests in educational technology is on exploring tools that can be used to support the distance and online education. In my long journey as an educational technology novelty, I found a tool that gives me a board opportunity to participate on open learning for distance and online education. The tool called WiZiQ.

WiZiQ is not only a virtual classroom management solution, but also a site for building the educational networking. People who have a WiZiQ account can become a teacher and also a student. WiZiQ enables their community to learn each other as an online learning community. In fact, as an infrastructure, WiZiQ has to be able to maintain it development. Therefore, WiZiQ has two options for it members, a free version and a premium version. A free version is dedicated for members who come from the educational community. That is why this free version also known as academic free version. The free version has some limitation compare to the premium version. However, the facilities on this version are sufficient for me as a novelty in the distance and online to practice on maintaining distance and online learning.

The purpose of this presentation is for sharing my personal experience on using wiziq.com. I will go beyond my experience from the features of WiZiQ online virtual class to other feature on this site. WiZiQ has a social networking system, where members can become a follower and be followed by others. This social networking can also be shared to other popular social networking sites, which are Tweeter and Facebook. In WiZiQ, a member can learn from other as a student and can also become a teacher for other members. WiZiQ enables its educational free member to have a 10 GB personal storage. In addition to the features of WiZiQ, I would like to show the conference attendances some example of links to my free class recording and my open access learning materials.

WiZiQ is one of the emerging technologies that can be used as an alternative for teaching-learning, collaboration, and online professional meeting. In North America, this tool is less popular compare to another tool. However, this tool is popular being used in Asia and Europe. One of the purposes of this conference is making the connection for people all around the world. From this connection, we can teach and learn together, building a better understanding, and promote the cross-cultural understanding. WiZiQ can be used to mediate this connection.

All Audiences online tool, virtual classroom, online forum, online education management system