When IM Is the Best Way to Stay on Top

We like this, the SCUP office uses AIM a lot:

It’s tough to keep up on your workload, whether you’re a faculty member responsible for several classes or a student juggling a full schedule. The logistical dance becomes even more daunting for those learning remotely — from computers hundreds of miles away, or another campus in the same college system.

Yet those are everyday problems for students and instructors at large, sprawling community college systems, especially those that offer a significant portion of their courses online. The country’s largest singly accredited system, Ivy Tech Community College, in Indiana, thinks the solution is already staring many of its students in the face: instant messaging, hardwired into every teenager since the heyday of America Online.

The community college system, which serves more than 115,000 students a year on 23 separate campuses across the state, adopted an instant messaging platform called Pronto, from the collaborative learning software company Wimba. Like a turbocharged AOL Instant Messenger or Google Talk, it lets students chat online with their professors in text, audio or video form, for virtual office hours or impromptu question-and-answer sessions.