Jenzabar, which sells software and services for higher education, today announced that social networking capabilities are available with its “Learning Management System.”

 

The functionality “allows faculty members to incorporate social networking services into their online learning curriculum,” according to company officials.

 

The social networking phenomenon, in the estimation of the Jenzabar, offers “one of the newest ways to engage students and has had a global impact online learning initiatives.”

 

According to a national survey published in January 2007, conducted by Pew (News - Alert) Internet & American Life Project, “a social networking site is an online place where a user can create a profile and build a personal network that connects him or her to other users.” Think Facebook (News - Alert) and MySpace, engaging tens of millions of users.

 

According to the survey, more than 55 percent of all online American tweens and teenagers use online social networking sites. As does this forty-something dad, keeping a toe in his kids’ world.

 

The functionality available on Jenzabar LMS allows faculty members to build links to social networking applications so that faculty members and students have the ability to interact on a social networking site within the content of an online course. Faculty members can also build course content on a social networking site using the Jenzabar LMS architecture.

 

Social networking services that are currently available on Jenzabar LMS are online chat, online messaging and forums. In addition, Jenzabar will be focusing on making available additional social networking capabilities in the upcoming months.

 

“Technology will have an ever greater impact on the way students learn and the methods teachers use to teach,” said Robert A. Maginn, Jr., Jenzabar, chairman and chief executive officer.

 

Jenzabar LMS is integrated with Jenzabar’s Internet Campus Solution, a Web portal providing a single point of access to e-learning, online self-service, communication, and community building tools.

 

Last month, Jenzabar announced that Brigham Young University at Idaho had selected Jenzabar’s Total Campus Management product, including Jenzabar CX, Jenzabar’s Internet Campus Solution (JICS) and the Jenzabar Non-Traditional System (Jenzabar NTS (News - Alert)). The school chose Jenzabar CX for its flexibility and movement to an open architecture.

 

Prior to the purchase of Jenzabar’s Total Campus Management products, BYU-Idaho has been running on a homegrown system and saw a need to continue expanding the school’s technology infrastructure to an ERP product that could provide greater efficiency and would be extensible to an open system. In addition, the university was looking for some additional functionality.

 

In choosing an ERP vendor, BYU–Idaho was “impressed that Jenzabar was moving Jenzabar CX to a more open architecture, which would allow them to integrate other vendor products with Jenzabar in a Service Oriented Architecture,” according to Jenzabar officials.

 

The Jenzabar CX ERP system is offered on a UNIX platform with a Java-based interface. The product allows administrative and academic staff to access, update, store, and report on data through a common database and a suite of modules.