COMMUNITY PROFILE

Creating and Adopting Immersive
Learning Environment in Second Life

New, innovative technologies such as networked 3-D virtual environments are gaining popularity and reaching mainstream users. Students will be attracted to these environments and spend increasing amount of time in them, whether or not we are ready to use them for educational purposes. The Second Life synthetic world has great potential for teaching and learning. For faculty members to adopt Second Life and take advantage of innovative features in their classes, however, they must first get to know Second Life and become familiar with features that are relevant to their own teaching. In addition, the creation of engaging teaching and learning aids in Second Life requires not only strong scripting skills, visual design skills, and 3-D modelling skills, but also expertise in subject contents. As a result, a multi-discipline team with a diverse skill set is likely to be more productive in Second Life than individual instructors with expertise only in individual disciplines. This learning community project establishes a Second Life Learning Community at Ohio University, through which we could introduce Second Life to interested faculty members and discuss how tools like Second Life can be used in our own individual classes and disciplines. We chose this approach because 1) faculty learning communities are an effective way of facilitating interactions among faculty members from different disciplines, and 2) we had experience in establishing and operating a coherent, productive faculty learning community.

The goal of this learning community is to

1. collaboratively create a teaching and learning environment in Second Life that can help improve teaching and learning at Ohio University, and
2. help community members adopt Second Life in classes taught by these members. 

In particular, we propose to create a replica of the Stocker Engineering Building in Second Life and use it to host virtual classrooms, virtual interactive science labs, and other teaching and learning venues and tools. We will use this virtual building and the instructional tools in it in our classes

We plan to produce the following deliverables from this project.

• A virtual replica of the Stocker Engineering Building, which will host our Second Life activities.
• A number of teaching aids in Second Life, such as a voting tool, a survey tool, and a tool that supports in-class group activities.

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OLN Southeast Regional Center at Shawnee State University in Partnership with the Teaching and Learning Center 940 Second St., Portsmouth, OH 45662 (740) 351-3334