EDUCAUSE Review Articles and E-Learning

The authors used Second Life to teach a course designed for non-science majors who need to fulfill their natural sciences university requirement. The students were required to do a creative project, Second Life was introduced as an innovative way for students to express their projects.

In this article, we describe our collaborative research toward creating a “mixed reality teaching and learning environment” (MiRTLE) that enables teachers and students participating in real-time mixed and online classes to interact with avatar representations of each other. The longer-term hypothesis is that avatar representations of teachers and students will help create a sense of shared presence, engendering a sense of community and improving student engagement in online lessons.

The author, Lawrence A. Rowe, the founding director of the Berkeley Multimedia Research Center (BMRC), discusses webcasting and putting academic video on the web free and open to the world.

EDUCAUSE presents the top-ten IT-related issues in terms of strategic importance to the institution, as revealed by the ninth annual EDUCAUSE Current Issues Survey. This year, Security moves back to the top of the list.

 “The movement toward open content forces us to really think about what value it is we bring to students who enroll at the Open University. I think that we are getting to that tipping point—rethinking the underlying pedagogy with which we have conventionally delivered distance education and open learning.”

Focusing on “imagining the future,” the EDUCAUSE Evolving Technologies Committee looked at seven technologies and trends of 2007: the Web, Google Apps, Web conferencing, m-learning, 3D printing, virtualization, and information lifecycle management and physical storage technologies for digital.

A selection of information regarding learning simulations developed by Wharton's Alfred West Jr. Learning Lab.

Under the direction of SURF, the higher education institutions in the Netherlands are working on a collaborative strategy for the application of information and communications technology (ICT) to meet the needs of individual users.

The author discusses a recent disruptive innovation, Indiana University's 3+1 program, and the possible effects it may have on higher education in the future.

An examination of the relatively short history of "Internet Colleges" in China offers a glimpse of the larger aspects and potential of online higher education in the country and also reveals many of the problems involved in institutionalizing online education in an established system.