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Second Life is used as a platform for education by many institutions, such as colleges, universities, libraries and government entities.
| | This article needs additional citations for verification .(July 2014) |
Second Life is used as a platform for education by many institutions, such as colleges, universities, libraries and government entities.
There are over one hundred regions used for educational purposes covering subjects such as chemistry [1] and English. [2] [3] Instructors and researchers in Second Life favor it because it is more personal than traditional distance learning. [4] Research published in 2007 suggested that development, teaching and/or learning activities using Second Life were present in over 80 percent of UK universities. [5] As of 2008, at least 300 universities around the world teach courses or conduct research in SL. [6] New educational institutions have also emerged that operate exclusively within Second Life, [7] taking advantage of the platform to deliver content to a worldwide audience at low cost. [8]
Info Islands uses library programming sponsored by the Illinois' Alliance Library System and OPAL currently offered online to librarians and library users within Second Life. Another virtual continent called SciLands is devoted to science and technology education. While initially centered on the International Spaceflight Museum, it now hosts a number of organizations including NASA, NOAA, NIH, JPL, NPR, National Physical Laboratory, UK, and a host of other government agencies, universities, and museums. In December 2008, the United States Air Force launched MyBase, a Second Life island overseen by the Air Education and Training Command. [9]
Second Life's usefulness as a platform for pre-K–12 education is limited due to the age restrictions on the main grid and the difficulties of collaborating among various educational projects on the teen grid.
Ernst & Young made a $500,000 donation to the North Carolina State University Accounting Department to implement Second Life into the curriculum in 2009. [10] This funding was utilized by Frank A Buckless along with Mr. Scott Showalter and Dr. Kathy Krawczyk to create a virtual warehouse for their students to audit. [11] [12] The data collected from this study showed that students improved "inventory observation knowledge, interviewing, audit documentation, critical thinking, and group work skills". [13] [14] This project follows incorporation of cost and financial accounting activities in virtual environments. [15]
Language learning is the most widespread type of education in virtual worlds, [16]
Second life has been utilized in nursing education to provide meaningful care experience without risk to patients. [17]
Dr. Constance M. Johnson received a R21 award to evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of using a virtual environment to provide self-management interventions to people with type 2 diabetes. [18]
Dr. Estelle Codier (University of Hawaii) received a National League for Nursing grant award to study learning outcomes for student nurses in Second Life. Her book, "Teaching Healthcare in Virtual Space: Best Practices for Educators in Multi-User Virtual Environments" provides an outline of the pedagogical basis for teaching in MUVE, as well as chapters on development of MUVE teaching skills and others on how to develop learning activities in Second Life. July, 2016.
Second Life has twice, in 2007 and 2010, banned a California educational institution, Woodbury University, from having a representation within Second Life. On 20 April 2010 four simulators belonging to the university were deleted and the accounts of several students and professors terminated, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education . Dr. Edward Clift, the dean of Woodbury University's School of Media, Culture and Design, stated that their campus "was a living, breathing campus in Second Life", that included educational spaces designed mostly by students, including a mock representation of the former Soviet Union and a replica of the Berlin Wall. As Dr. Clift told The Chronicle of Higher Education, the virtual campus did not "conform to what Linden Lab wanted a campus to be". [19] [20] [21] Linden Lab said their decision to ban Woodbury University in April 2010 was "based on historical and recent events that constitute a breach of the Second Life community standards and terms of service." [20]
The university has since moved to a separate, dedicated OpenSimulator grid. [22]
Annabeth Robinson is a Second Life performer and educator who lectures at Leeds College of Art. [23] She develops tools and techniques for improving virtual environment education including the widely used MetaLab Whiteboard. [24]
Robin Winter aka Shukran Fahid / Shukran Serendipity has worked with several organisations including Immersive Education and Imperial College to produce a number of training programmes for schools, universities, the NHS and the Ministry of Defense using both Second Life and Open Sim. Currently the CEO of Warm Winter Arts, he is bringing virtualisation into mobile applications and biological sciences. [25]
Dr. Estelle Codier is an associate professor at the University of Hawaii who has supervised over 500 health care learning activities in Second Life. Her book, "Teaching Healthcare in Second Life: Best Practices for Educators in Multi User Virtual Environments" outlines a pedagogical basis for teaching in Second Life and provides guidelines for developing teaching skills and learning activities in MUVE. July, 2016. [26]
Distance education, also known as distance learning, is the education of students who may not always be physically present at school, or where the learner and the teacher are separated in both time and distance. Traditionally, this usually involved correspondence courses wherein the student corresponded with the school via mail. Distance education is a technology-mediated modality and has evolved with the evolution of technologies such as video conferencing, TV, and the Internet. Today, it usually involves online education and the learning is usually mediated by some form of technology. A distance learning program can either be completely a remote learning, or a combination of both online learning and traditional offline classroom instruction. Other modalities include distance learning with complementary virtual environment or teaching in virtual environment (e-learning).
The University of North Carolina at Pembroke is a public university in Pembroke, North Carolina. UNC Pembroke is a master's level degree-granting university and part of the University of North Carolina system. Its history is intertwined with that of the Lumbee nation.
Pedagogy, most commonly understood as the approach to teaching, is the theory and practice of learning, and how this process influences, and is influenced by, the social, political, and psychological development of learners. Pedagogy, taken as an academic discipline, is the study of how knowledge and skills are imparted in an educational context, and it considers the interactions that take place during learning. Both the theory and practice of pedagogy vary greatly as they reflect different social, political, and cultural contexts.
Second Life is a multiplayer virtual world that allows people to create an avatar for themselves and then interact with other users and user-created content within a multi-user online environment. Developed and owned by the San Francisco-based firm Linden Lab and launched on June 23, 2003, it saw rapid growth for some years and in 2013 it had approximately one million regular users. Growth eventually stabilized, and by the end of 2017, the active user count had fallen to "between 800,000 and 900,000". In many ways, Second Life is similar to massively multiplayer online role-playing games; nevertheless, Linden Lab is emphatic that their creation is not a game: "There is no manufactured conflict, no set objective."
Educational technology is the combined use of computer hardware, software, and educational theory and practice to facilitate learning. When referred to with its abbreviation, "EdTech", it often refers to the industry of companies that create educational technology. In EdTech Inc.: Selling, Automating and Globalizing Higher Education in the Digital Age, Tanner Mirrlees and Shahid Alvi (2019) argue "EdTech is no exception to industry ownership and market rules" and "define the EdTech industries as all the privately owned companies currently involved in the financing, production and distribution of commercial hardware, software, cultural goods, services and platforms for the educational market with the goal of turning a profit. Many of these companies are US-based and rapidly expanding into educational markets across North America, and increasingly growing all over the world."
Ayub Medical College is a public medical institute located in Abbottabad, Pakistan. It is one of the medical colleges affiliated to Khyber Medical University. AMC is the second oldest medical college of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Reflective practice is the ability to reflect on one's actions so as to take a critical stance or attitude towards one's own practice and that of one's peers, engaging in a process of continuous adaptation and learning. According to one definition it involves "paying critical attention to the practical values and theories which inform everyday actions, by examining practice reflectively and reflexively. This leads to developmental insight". A key rationale for reflective practice is that experience alone does not necessarily lead to learning; deliberate reflection on experience is essential.
The University of Malawi (UNIMA) is a public university established in 1965 and until 4 May 2021, when the university underwent a delinking, was composed of four constituent colleges located in Zomba, Blantyre, and Lilongwe. Of the four colleges, the largest is Chancellor College in Zomba. It is part of the Malawian government educational system. The last Vice-Chancellor was Professor John Kalenga Saka.
In health care, a simulated patient (SP), also known as a standardized patient, sample patient, or patient instructor, is an individual trained to act as a real patient in order to simulate a set of symptoms or problems. Simulated patients have been successfully utilized for education, evaluation of health care professionals, as well as basic, applied, and translational medical research.
Quest Atlantis (QA) was a 3D multiuser, computer graphics learning environment that utilized a narrative programming toolkit to immerse children, ages 9–16, in meaningful inquiry tasks. Quest Atlantis combined strategies used in the commercial gaming environment with lessons from educational research on learning and motivation. The project was unique in its goals to combine the best aspects of learning, playing, and helping, as a means to motivate and engage students. It allowed users to travel to virtual places to perform educational activities, talk with other users and mentors, and build virtual personae. The project was intended to engage children ages 9–16 in a form of transformational play comprising both online and off-line learning activities, with a storyline inspiring a disposition towards social action. More than sugar-coating content to coerce dis-empowered students into caring about disciplinary knowledge, the goal of Quest Atlantis was to establish educational worlds where children become empowered scientists, doctors, reporters, and mathematicians who have to understand disciplinary content to accomplish desired ends.
ANGEL Learning, Inc. was a privately held educational software company specializing in eLearning. Its main products are the ANGEL Learning Management Suite (LMS), ANGEL ePortfolio, and services offerings. In May 2009, it was acquired by Blackboard Inc.
In the history of virtual learning environments, the 1990s was a time of growth, primarily due to the advent of the affordable computer and of the Internet.
American College of Education (ACE) is a private for-profit online college based in Indianapolis, Indiana, focused on education, healthcare, nursing, and business. American College of Education is a certified B Corporation and a subsidiary of ACE Holdco PBC of Dallas, Texas.
Diversity University was the first MOO dedicated specifically for education. Like other MUDs, it was an online realm that allowed people to interact in real time by connecting to a central server, assuming a virtual identity within that realm, "teleporting" or "walking" to virtual rooms, and holding text-based conversations with others who had entered the same virtual room. The MOO server kept track of which characters were in each virtual "room," so that the comments of each character would be sent back to the computers of every other person whose character was "in" the same virtual "room." What distinguished Diversity University from other MOOs was its central structuring metaphor as a virtual university campus, as well as its pioneering use for actual online classes.
The Michigan State University College of Nursing is the nursing college at Michigan State University. It is located on the southeastern side of campus in East Lansing, Michigan, United States. The college is centered in the Life Sciences Building. The dean of the school is Leigh Small. The College of Nursing is among the top 100 graduate nursing programs in the country, ranking at #36 in the nation according to U.S. News & World Report. The College of Nursing at Michigan State University offers a professional student environment that fosters professional and personal development of pre-nursing and nursing students. The college shares the university's research, compassion, and high-achieving educational goals. The college provides several options to become a nurse or advance your nursing education. Those include: BSN Pathways, MSN concentrations, DNP program, PhD program and various continuing education opportunities.
Virtual worlds are playing an increasingly important role in education, especially in language learning. By March 2007 it was estimated that over 200 universities or academic institutions were involved in Second Life. Joe Miller, Linden Lab Vice President of Platform and Technology Development, claimed in 2009 that "Language learning is the most common education-based activity in Second Life". Many mainstream language institutes and private language schools are now using 3D virtual environments to support language learning.
Social learning tools are tools used for pedagogical and andragogical purposes that utilize social software and/or social media in order to facilitate learning through interactions between individuals and systems. The idea of setting up "social learning tools" is to make education more convenient and widespread. It also allows an interaction between users and/or the software which can bring a different aspect to learning. People can acquire knowledge by distance learning tools, for instance, Facebook, Twitter, Khan Academy and so on. Social learning tools may mediate in formal or informal learning environments to help create connections between learners, instructors and information. These connections form dynamic knowledge networks. Social learning tools are used in schools for teaching/learning and in businesses for training. Within a school environment, the use of social learning tools can affect not only the user (student) but his/her caretaker as well as his/her instructor. It brings a different approach to the traditional way of learning which affects the student and his/her support circle. Companies also use social learning tools. They used them to improve knowledge transfer within departments and across teams. Businesses use a variety of these tools to create a social learning environment. They are also used in company settings to help improve team work, problem solving, and performance in stressful situations.
Annabeth Robinson, whose online Second Life alias is AngryBeth Shortbread, is a multi-media artist and lecturer based in Leeds, UK where she focusses on the teaching of audio, visual and online technologies. Using Second Life and other Multi User Virtual Environments (MUVEs), Robinson explores their potential as a medium for art and design practice whilst examining its educational potential. Robinson has been undertaking such projects since 2005.
Frank A Buckless is an American business educator, textbook editor and author, as well as consultant who is known for his expertise in auditing. Buckless is the Stephen P. Zelnak Dean of the Poole College of Management at North Carolina State University.
Online learning involves courses offered by primary institutions that are 100% virtual. Online learning, or virtual classes offered over the internet, is contrasted with traditional courses taken in a brick-and-mortar school building. It is a development in distance education that expanded in the 1990s with the spread of the commercial Internet and the World Wide Web. The learner experience is typically asynchronous but may also incorporate synchronous elements. The vast majority of institutions utilize a learning management system for the administration of online courses. As theories of distance education evolve, digital technologies to support learning and pedagogy continue to transform as well.
Codier, Estelle( 2016) Teaching Healthcare in Virtual Space: Best Practices for Educators in Multi-User Virtual Environments. University of Hawaii Press: Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-5800-1
