Virtual Collaboration Spaces: The EVE Community

An Educational Virtual Environment (EVE) is an instance of a Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE), which focalises in providing collaborative, as well as educational, functionalities, such as synchronous and asynchronous e-learning services. This paper describes such an educational virtual community, which aims to meet the requirements of a virtual collaboration space and furthermore to support e-learning services. In particular, we are developing a web-based system, which allows users to communicate with the other members of the community through forums, chat, e-mail, to schedule events which take place in the learning environment and to join, and even create, courses, which are held in 3D multi-user worlds where users are represented by avatars. These characteristics offer extended functionalities such as support of application sharing and voice chat, transmission of the educational material as well as transmission of the users' profiles to the other community members. We describe the model of this community and the functionalities that it provides

Exploiting Virtual Environments and Web2.0 Immersive Worlds to Support Collaborative e- Learning Communities

The main goal of this paper is to facilitate educational designers and developers by providing a point of reference for making decisions on how to incorporate 3D environments into the applications they develop as well as for extending their capabilities by integrating more functionality. Therefore, this paper presents the design principles for virtual spaces, which aim at supporting multi-user communication in web-based learning communities. In addition the implementation of these principles is presented using as point of reference EVE Training Area. This environment constitutes a three-dimensional space where participants, represented by 3D humanoid avatars, have the ability to use a variety of 3D e-collaboration tools for learning together. Furthermore, this paper presents how these principles could be used as criteria for validating and extending ready Web2.0 Immersive worlds for supporting collaborative e-learning. Finally collaborative e-learning usage scenarios that could be realized by exploiting collaborative virtual environments are described

A platform for virtual collaboration spaces and educational communities: the case of EVE

This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of EVE Community Prototype, which is an educational virtual community aiming to meet the requirements of a Virtual Collaboration Space and to support e-learning services. Furthermore, this paper describes the design and implementation of an integrated platform for Networked Virtual Environments, called EVE Platform, which supports the afore-mentioned educational community. This platform supports stable event sharing and creation of multi-user three dimensional (3D) places, H.323based voice over IP services integrated in 3D spaces as well as multiple concurrent virtual worlds

DOI 10.1007/s00530-005-0005-x REGULAR PAPER

A platform for virtual collaboration spaces and educational communities: the case of EV

Virtual Learning Communities - Theory and Practice: the Case of VirRAD

In this paper we discuss the development of virtual communities and especially virtual learning communities, taking into account basic community requirements as well as social factors of e-learning. This paper has been inspired by the VirRAD European project and presents the intermediate results that have raised form the definition of a virtual community for the vocational training of radiopharmacists. We therefore present the user requirements that form the functional specification of such an environment along with the role model that provides a mindful but solid distribution of the access level in the system

Building e-learning communities: The case of VirRAD

This paper discusses the development of virtual communities and especially e-learning communities. In particular, this paper is inspired by VirRAD European project, and presents the intermediate results that have raised from the definition of this virtual radiopharmacy community