Reflections on the use of Project Wonderland as a mixed-reality environment for teaching and learning

This paper reflects on the lessons learnt from MiRTLE?a collaborative research project to create a ?mixed reality teaching and learning environment? that enables teachers and students participating in real-time mixed and online classes to interact with avatar representations of each other. The key hypothesis of the project is that avatar representations of teachers and students can help create a sense of shared presence, engendering a greater sense of community and improving student engagement in online lessons. This paper explores the technology that underpins such environments by presenting work on the use of a massively multi-user game server, based on Sun?s Project Darkstar and Project Wonderland tools, to create a shared teaching environment, illustrating the process by describing the creation of a virtual classroom. It is planned that the MiRTLE platform will be used in several trial applications ? which are described in the paper. These example applications are then used to explore some of the research issues arising from the use of virtual environments within an education environment. The research discussion initially focuses on the plans to assess this within the MiRTLE project. This includes some of the issues of designing virtual environments for teaching and learning, and how supporting pedagogical and social theories can inform this process

The State and Use of Virtual Tutors

Virtual tutoring is the process by which students and teachers participate in the learning experience in an online, virtual, or networked environment. This process can not only separate the participants from each other in a physical space, but it can also separate them by time. Virtual tutoring can take the form of the group of students coming together synchronously in an online setting and receiving lessons from a single tutor, or by asynchronous learning in which the teacher pre-plans lessons in advance that the students consume on their own time. The advent of online learning technologies and virtual learning environments are gaining significant attention, and are likely to become a key aspect of teaching and learning at all levels of education. With the recent advancements in technology and especially artificial intelligence, the state of the art of virtual tutoring is becoming more and more advanced as well. In this literature review, I will propose the question of \u27\u27What are the current uses and state of the art of virtual tutoring?\u27\u2

Virtual worlds, Internet resources, motivation: The results of a research project

Udostępnienie publikacji Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego finansowane w ramach projektu „Doskonałość naukowa kluczem do doskonałości kształcenia”. Projekt realizowany jest ze środków Europejskiego Funduszu Społecznego w ramach Programu Operacyjnego Wiedza Edukacja Rozwój; nr umowy: POWER.03.05.00-00-Z092/17-00

Beyond e-learning: from blended methodology to transmedia education

Nowadays, at the time of convergence culture, social network, and transmedia storytelling – when social interactions are constantly remediated – e-learning, especially in universities, should be conceived as a sharing educational activity. Different learning experiences should become smoother and able to fade out the closed learning environments (as software platform and classrooms (either virtual or not)). In this paper, we will show some experiences of the Communication Sciences degree program of the University of Cagliari, which is supplied through an e-learning method. In the ten years since its foundation, the approach has evolved from a blended learning with two kinds of traditional activity (online activities and face-to-face lessons) to a much more dynamic learning experience. Many new actors (communication companies, local government, public-service corporations, new media and social media) – indeed – have been involved in educational and teaching process. But also these processes changed: collaborative working, new media comprehension, self-guided problem solving are examples of the new literacies and approaches that can be reached as new learning objectives

Teaching and Learning in Cross-Disciplinary Virtual Teams

Virtual teams collaborate across distances using information communication technologies (ICTs). A distinctive set of communication skills is needed by people who work successfully in virtual teams, and few universities or companies provide structured education and training in virtual teamwork. At a midsized southeastern Masters Comprehensive University, professors from the Colleges of Arts and Sciences, Business, and Education came together to explore how they might use cross-disciplinary student teams (groups comprised of students with different backgrounds and educational goals) to teach concepts in their own disciplines while providing students with the opportunity to become more pro?cient in virtual team communication. Can cross-disciplinary student team projects successfully support learning in virtual team communication as well as address the learning objectives of speci?c courses? (2) What can faculty learn from a cross-disciplinary teaching model that can be applied to virtual teams? Experiential learning is based on performing real tasks and re?ecting on that process; it bene?ts learners by engaging them in complex, authentic situations. Virtual teams are signi?cant because they support a great deal of the work currently taking place in our global economy; they are signi?cant in higher education because students need to develop skills in international virtual communication before they are introduced to high-stakes work environments. In previous cases, students have collaborated across national cultures to develop project deliverables, such as websites, reports, and usability studies and present them in virtual environments using such tools as WebEx, Skype, and live streaming. The ?ndings from this case are based on individual student re?ections, which were used to create a data matrix for each project, and instructor observation and evaluation. In Spring 2013, six faculty from the same university worked together to incorporate virtual teams into their classrooms. These six faculty members were divided into two groups of three with each group representing three colleges mentioned earlier. The faculty developed two interdisciplinary projects (one on infographics and another on social media) that enabled rich and diverse student collaboration. In both groups, the three faculty leaders worked together to de?ne a project scope that students could achieve and that would relate to learning goals in each discipline. The lessons learned from this experience are that: (1) technical challenges will occur; (2) students from all disciplines must receive the same information; (3) instructors must balance respect for their colleagues and support for their students; (4) team assignments need to be consistent and fair; (5) instructors need to establish appropriate and fair assessment measurements for their own students; and (6) projects need to be realistic in order to show the students the value of virtual wor