webCafé

Groupware Platform for Instruction and Collaboration

WebCafé, Wharton's custom learning environment, provides strong collaboration tools for students, easy adoption by faculty, and the ability to add new features and custom capabilities.

Addressing key elements of Wharton's academic programs, the webCafé platform:

  • Reinforces the collaborative interactions and student group work central to Wharton's learning team approach.
  • Supports the course management needs of more than 250 faculty members, teaching more than 400 courses each year.
  • Creates a robust and secure online environment accessible from any computer, anywhere in the world.

WebCafé lets students collaborate on projects, from anywhere and at any time, to work more productively and free up 'face time' for activities that truly benefit from personal interactions. Wharton professors are able to streamline course management and communications, using a common template for Wharton course eRooms that can be easily customized to add a rich array of course-specific communication and collaboration features.

WebCafé offers Wharton students and faculty:

  • Customizable templates for Wharton course learning environments with designated areas for course materials, discussions, team folders, and many other unique features
  • Team sign-up tools for quick team assembly, with automatically created private team folders
  • Automatic search indexing of uploaded lecture slides and supplemental files
  • Nightly e-mails generated and sent to the members of each room to summarize new faculty uploads
  • Discussion boards that allow questions from individual students to be answered for the whole class
  • Online quizzes and evaluation forms
  • A custom-developed Grade Book providing students with an individual "My Grades" feature

Technical Platform

Software:

  • EMC Documentum eRoom enterprise collaboration solution
  • Microsoft SQL Server
  • Cogix ViewsFlash
  • Questionmark Perception

Hardware:

  • Load-balanced IBM X Servers
  • Virtualized load-balanced cluster on IBM BladeCenter servers
  • IBM TotalStorage DS4100 storage area network
  • IBM TotalStorage DS400 storage area network

webCafé Recognition

Awards
Press

Why "webCafé"?

Wharton students often meet in the School cafés and lounges (as well as the dedicated Group Study Rooms) to work together and to collaborate on team projects. WebCafé provides a similar virtual meeting space for online teamwork and collaboration.


For More Information


"A Great Line of Communication"

"With webCafé, you can communicate with your teammates, share files, and organize your documents, – and it's a great line of communication between you and the professor."

Richard Hillen, W'08

WebCafé integrates course materials with class discussions, broadcast e-mail, presence detection, and instant messaging.

"I Can't Imagine Managing Without It"

"One of the biggest things we do in Black Wharton, an undergraduate student organization, is organize the Howard E. Mitchell Memorial Forum – a 2-day conference that includes speakers and recruiters, and draws students from other top schools. We use webCafé to post all of our planning materials, so we don't have to send documents around to everyone. I can't imagine managing all the coordination involved without it."

Lloyd Singletary, W'08