E-Learning

"A few months back, at the beginning of the semester, National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA) made an award to Babson College and the Sloan Consortium to develop a virtual (business) incubator in Second Life. Students in this class would engage in research and development that had the potential of making a significant difference in the field of entrepreneurship globally."

Comprehensive study finds that students overwhelmingly prefer having their lectures available online, either for remote access or for later viewing.

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.

Oakland University's LMS policy on support and users of Moodle and other online learning management software.

This paper analyses the university as an Internet intermediary in the current climate of online distance education, classifies the stakeholders associated with the university in Web course management, and explores the need for an “Instructional Design Copyright Law”. The situation is likened to a theatrical production, with front-of-house preparations, backstage operations, and tragic characters.

The National Science Foundation defines "cyberlearning" as "the use of networked computing and communications technologies to support learning." The report of the NSF Task Force on Cyberlearning, Fostering Learning in the Networked World: The Cyberlearning Opportunity and Challenge, A 21st Century Agenda for the National Science Foundation, identifies cyberlearning as having "…the potential to transform education throughout a lifetime, enabling customized interaction with diverse learning materials on any topic..."

The task force report identifies potential ways in which advanced computing and communications technologies might be leveraged to support learning, highlighting opportunities for further research. In it, the task force offers 5 recommendations for the NSF to pursue: