Virtual Learning Community, Instructional Technologies, and Presented at EDUCAUSE Annual Conferences

Educating our students is certainly our priority, but how can we connect learners to each other in a way that provides more opportunities for personal growth, networking, and connections? By taking advantage of virtual spaces like Facebook, Twitter, and Second Life, we give our students space to learn outside the classroom.

An operating room simulation was developed in Second Life to teach KUMC Nurse Anesthesia students basic operating room procedures. This presentation will describe the design, development, usability testing, and outcomes of this simulation. It will also examine how to adapt our simulation method to teach procedural content in your courses.

This presentation will examine teaching techniques in virtual environments, particularly Second Life, from the perspectives of an instructor and instructional designer and demonstrate how a second-year nursing program successfully uses Second Life to teach clinical procedures, critical thinking, and decision making.

The education industry has grown weary of the "next big thing." Technology has promised much over the years, but have virtual worlds finally delivered on the promise? This session will focus on the major issues facing teaching and learning in a virtual environment.

Second Life is a user-created virtual world simultaneously played by thousands of people around the world. In this session, we’ll share our experiences of teaching in Second Life. Using the interaction combinations integration model we developed as a framework, we will describe our projects, outcomes, and recommendations.