Company Overview
With leading edge instructional services and course building technology, eConcordia offers customized courseware to students and the university faculty. Furthermore, eConcordia takes full advantage of the Internet and telecommunication technologies to deliver superior on-line content that meets the needs and expectations of our ever growing clientele. eConcordia's enrollment of approximately 5000 students per year demonstrates the need for superior technology to support a growing educational organization. To reflect eConcordia's dedication to using the finest resources, the company has also chosen to use the most efficient discussion board software for all of its on-line credit courses.

eConcordia is a for-profit e-learning company established and wholly owned by the Concordia University Foundation. eConcordia's principal mission is to facilitate, produce and/or market e-learning courses and modules, and thereby, further the academic mission of Concordia University, its Faculties and Continuing Education. These courses and modules may be for credit or not-for-credit. eConcordia provides a single, unified, high-profile vehicle for making high-quality initiatives by Concordia in e-learning that are visible locally, nationally, and internationally. It will help significantly in attracting students, academic partners and client/partner institutions, organizations and companies. eConcordia creates courseware that meets both the educational and technological requirements of its student, professional, and corporate clients. Working closely with content experts, eConcordia designs on-line courses and training modules that are user-friendly, academically or professionally fulfilling, and easy to access anytime, anywhere.

Business Challenge
eConcordia's former discussion board was difficult for staff members to get comfortable with and lacked many of the components that were desired. Other problems for eConcordia included:

• Extremely high levels of incoming e-mails;
• Limited discussion board options; and,
• Limited authentication.

Problem summary:
eConcordia places much emphasis on on-line communication and user-friendly software. Staff members grew tired of difficult programs that required a great deal of maintenance and tended to be inconsistent in all the same ways. Past discussion boards required users to log in twice-once to log in to the eConcordia portal, and then again to gain access to the actual discussion board. This process proved to be both time-consuming and frustrating for users. The company also sought software that would significantly reduce the cost of managing overloaded email in-boxes. The new software simply needed to be faster and easier for everyone to work with.

Summary
FuseTalk is being used as a discussion forum for eConcordia's on-line academic and professional courses. The discussion board serves as a means of communication between students as well as between students and instructors. Student messages are posted on the on-line discussion board, allowing their colleagues to view these messages and respond to them.

The great features and capabilities of FuseTalk have enabled eConcordia to integrate it easily into their system. Some of these capabilities that resolved eConcordia's challenges include: the wizards used to create polls, upload attachments, send messages, and create reports on usage. Moreover, integrating their users' sessions was done with great ease. eConcordia is looking forward to integrating and employing the white boarding feature that is part of the complete solution which FuseTalk offers.

Product Used
FuseTalk Standard Edition

WebSite
URL: http://www.econcordia.com