More than 1 million students and 100k teachers are using WizIQ according to the company’s homepage. Strengthening its footprint in the classic education space, WizIQ just recently announced two updates to its platform.
On the one hand, WizIQ now offers its virtual classroom as module for the Blackboard LMS. On the other hand, WizIQ opened up its API and launched a developer portal for anyone who would like to integrate the virtual classroom in their product or service.
The interesting thing is that WizIQ takes a bet on two competing systems at the same time. In one corner you have the well established but recently somewhat fading Blackboard LMS and in the other corner its main competitor, the up and coming open sourced Instructure Canvas LMS. And both get turn-key solutions for integrating the WizIQ classroom.
If you haven’t heard of Instructure Canvas and its positioning towards Blackboard yet, you might like to watch the first video ad they did for the launch a couple of months ago. Similarities with Apple’s 1984 ad are of course unintentional.
It is certainly too early to tell which of the two, if at all, will prevail and therefore it is a clever move to offer the same solution for both systems. Teachers who get used to the WizIQ classroom, then switch to a school that uses a different LMS would still be able to use the same virtual classroom environment.
Whereas the Blackboard module is ready to use today for version 9.0 and 9.1, the WizIQ Instructure Canvas integration is announced for release this fall. Other projects for open source systems like .LRN, openLMS, Centre SIS, and openSIS are also on the road map for later this year.
