The academic environment is usually characterized by two words: big and crowded. Usually, you have several hundred to tens of thousands of students learning, several dozen to hundreds of faculty teaching, and a like number of administrative personnel keeping it all going. Academic IT departments alone – often a couple dozen strong – struggle to keep this mass of people, activity, data and information organized. WebBoard Academic helps you by connecting all of these groups and data.

You see, fortunately, the academic environment also offers many opportunities for leveraging the power of technology and the internet. As a result most academic IT departments have adopted course management and learning management systems (CMS and LMS), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and powerful databases underneath them all to store and organize the vast amounts of information generated.  More recently, even content management systems (CMS) have started to make inroads as educators seek flexible platforms to manage their online presences. With the fairly recent advent of social networking and Web 2.0 (think MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.), educators are now seeking tools to create, moderate and grow online communities for their student bodies. 

For ten years, leading educators including UCLA, Duke University, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, the New York City College of Technology, University of Massachusetts at Lowell, and more have used WebBoard 9 to tie it all together by leveraging the power of all of these diverse systems: learning management, course management, content management, communications management, social networking – under an organized platform connecting:

• students and faculty: virtual online classrooms with private discussion areas for class work, questions about material, file review and “checkout” controls, and real-time chat tools – all with a robust calendar system to keep track of important due dates or deadlines and email integration to ensure everyone is connected
• students and other students: online community discussion areas to talk about course work, networking opportunities, extracurricular activities, group projects, and more using live chat, message boards, file sharing and highly customizable user profiles featuring optional social network integration
• IT and administrators: stay on top of emerging issues in your IT systems and gain real-time feedback from users campus-wide, share information about upcoming events, and stay connected with your team members

With WebBoard’s powerful Active Directory capabilities and database integration, bringing order to your people and data to deliver useful collaboration tools and vibrant online communities is as easy as three clicks. Be comfortable knowing that your collaboration and community environments are protected by powerful security features to preserve data and user privacy, and are backed by Akiva’s top-notch technical support.

Leverage the power of your information, content and communication management systems and get real, tangible benefits for your students, faculty and other personnel.

Call now or email to schedule a discussion about how WebBoard can help you connect your people!