Campus-centric distance education using Wimba Live Classroom

This paper describes the experience of deploying the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR) Master of Science in Information Quality as a combined on-campus distance education program since the fall of 2007. The program is unusual in that the distance education component is tied directly to the on-campus classes. All classes supporting the program are scheduled in regular on-campus classrooms and are webcast using the Wimba Live Classroom® function of Blackboard®, a commercial distance learning system. The paper also discusses the advantages of distance education using the campus-centric webcast approach as well as some of its challenges.