Second UCSC - 3D VLE

Virtual learning environments have been increasingly utilized in the domain of e-Learning recently. Virtual worlds such as SecondLife and OpenSimulator have opened up great opportunities in this front. The major issue with virtual worlds with respect to education is lack of models that consistently describe the entire learning process. Most of the prior work was focused on building tools to extend real world learning tasks to virtual worlds rather than building virtual world based learning models which consistently describe the virtual world based learning itself. The ongoing work presented here is focused on filling the void in virtual world based learning models.

The " Second UCSC" is a 3D hypothetical world hosted on the Internet where users can connect and interact with each other as well as with the object in it. During the past few years virtual worlds have become immensely popular to the point where it is being considered as an alternative VLE (Virtual Learning Environment). Most of the research that has been done to evaluate possibilities of virtual world based VLEs has been positive. All these attempts were focused on porting few of the real world learning scenarios such as organizing events, developing social skills, student commons, lecture halls to experiment with virtual world based learning. In some works Second Life has also been connected to existing VLE such as Moodle. However as of now no work has been done to identify a set of generalized guidelines or virtual world based learning models to describe the virtual world based learning process. Based on the prior works which have identified virtual worlds as a viable learning environment, we try to build a complete model for virtual world based learning process. The learning model is an abstract which describes how learning process involves tasks and object is organized.

Publications

• P. D. Ariyadewa, W.V. Wathsala, V. Pradeepan, R.P.D.D.T. Perera, D.A.S. Atukorale, “Virtual Learning Model for Metaverses” ”, International Conference on Advances in ICT for Emerging Regions - ICTer2010 Colombo, Sri Lanka, October, 2010.