Building Educational Virtual Environments

The collaborative virtual environments have become a good media for supporting collaborative e-learning services. In this paper we present the Educational Virtual Environments (EVE) platform, which integrates a variety of communication a collaboration tools to support collaborative virtual environments focused on collaborative e-learning

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

Extending the Limits of CVE' s to Support Collaborative e-Learning Scenarios

This paper proposes the use of collaborative virtual environments in order to provide collaborative e-learning services in an efficient and cost effective way. On the one hand, we present the transformation of well known collaborative learning techniques to collaborative elearning scenarios. The collaborative learning techniques, which are discussed in this paper, are brainstorming/roundtable, think pair share, jigsaw, quickwrites/microthemes, and structured academic controversies. On the other hand, we describe the necessary modifications of the collaborative virtual environments in order to support collaborative e-learning services and scenarios. Main proposals are the integration of more media to offer more awareness, the support of more people with different roles, and the definition of an integrated system architecture

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

Building Reusable and Interactive E-Learning Content Using Web

This paper presents the design of a web-based learning content authoring tool as well as the way learners can access courseware material, within the scope of a personalized, yet social, learning environment for vocational training. The authoring tool is intended to be part of the instructional component of the VirRAD European project, where the learning process is inspired by the principles of the Mindful Learning theory and supported by an intelligent learner modelling system. It will enable the creation of Radiopharmacy-related learning content that can be easily accessed and reused