VLE

The Arts Metaverse was developed by the University of British Columbia’s Arts Instructional Support and Information Technology unit. It is an immersive 3D VLE that provides an opportunity for scholars, teachers, students, and interested individuals to create and share a virtual space in collaboration.

The use of virtual worlds expands on the campus-based and online classrooms, enhancing learning experiences. Classes in virtual worlds offer opportunities for visualization, simulation, enhanced social networks, and shared learning experiences.

Genome Island (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Genome/118/145/53) was created to explore the potential for creating an interactive laboratory environment in the 3D virtual world of Second Life. College and university science courses that include a laboratory typically, because of the constraints of class scheduling, separate the lecture and laboratory components into different time blocks, and one of the challenges of college/university science becomes the meaningful integration of the two experiences. Virtual worlds offer the opportunity to eliminate the lecture/lab boundary by immersing students in an environment to be investigated.

Literature Alive! in Second Life creates immersive literary environments that have redefined the ways literature is shared in virtual environments.

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 SUNY Oneonta Music Project started with a simple goal: to give students in Oneonta’s music industry major the opportunity to organize concerts in a virtual world.

The New Media Consortium (http://www.nmc.org/) Campus in Second Life represents the largest educational project in any virtual world, comprising the efforts of well over 120 institutions. The NMC Campus landmass includes 91 sims (islands) that the NMC owns/manages as the NMC Campus, plus another 46 that represent the work of leading educational organizations that have chosen to collocate with the project.