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The Virtual University, Part 3

Obstacles and Rewards

Many universities already have virtual campuses—places where their students can meet one another, talking with instructors, or participate in online lectures. While these activities make sense for students who live a great distance from the university (and other non-traditional students), they’re using only a few of the virtual learning environment’s possibilities. Virtual environments can become simulation spaces, where students can explore and experiment with the topics that they’re learning. Games have been used as teaching tools for a long time (some folks might argue that games are all about learning, but that’s probably a topic for a different post), but too often, the learning gets “bolted on” to a video game mechanic that has little to do with the topic being taught.

January 22 2009 at 12:00PM • Posted in Industry • Read More

The Virtual University, Part 2

Quests and Teaching

(Continued from Part 1)

If you read the first part of this post, you know that I had a positive experience with an informal virtual teaching situation. The students were assigned some very general exploration tasks in an existing multi-user virtual world; later, I met with them in that same world to chat about their experiences. Although it took place online and inside a virtual world, the meetings were really just an extension of real-world teaching techniques—the questions I asked them and the general nature of the conversations didn’t differ significantly from the conversations I’d like to have with them during my regular office hours or in class. However, virtual worlds and MMOs present more teaching opportunities than a glorified chat room with 3D avatars. Second Life, where our conversations took place, gives its users many interactivity tools and opportunities to create their own environments, but it lacks the structure that’s already found in multi-player role-playing games. Games like these rely on a highly developed quest system to which instructors can apply current pedagogical models—switching to the virtual environment doesn’t mean throwing out existing, effective teaching methods.

January 08 2009 at 12:00PM • Posted in Industry • Read More

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