Icon: Screen-friendly stylesheet Screen-friendly page

I Te@ch: Investigate Educational Technologies :: Complimentary Tools

Virtual Worlds

What are Virtual Worlds?

Over the past five years, commercial and open source online virtual worlds like Second Life, Active Worlds, Club Penguin, Webkinz, and There have become increasingly accessible and popular among children and adults alike. In these worlds, users navigateusing avatars - graphical representations of themselves -through a simulated 3D environment. Virtual worlds are not games (although they may contain games inside them). Rather, they provide virtual places for people to meet, learn, socialize, play, and create.

How Virtual Worlds are Being Used in Higher Education?

While many virtual worlds, such as Club Penguin or Webkinz are largely frivolous and intended for the preteen set, others such as Second Life offer a number of possibilities for higher education. These include:

  • Distance Education and Blended Learning

Educators involved in distance education, blended learning, or other situations where significant amounts of instruction are conducted online, have found that virtual worlds offer an opportunity for students to participate more naturally in the social portions of the class—such as for discussions, lectures, and group work. To encourage this type of social interaction, the Global Campus is developing a site in the virtual world Second Life where students can meet informally and classes can meet.

  • Modeling and Simulation

Other instructors have used the malleability of space in virtual worlds to create or have their students create simulations and models that could be examined and interacted with by the residents of a virtual world. For example, Terry Beaubois of Montana State University teaches an architecture class in Second Life where his students create their buildings in the virtual world. His students can see how the residents of the world will interact with their creations. In another example, students in an international studies class at Montgomery College in Maryland developed a Second Life political simulation about the competition for international water resources. In this award winning simulation,participants must navigate a series of international crisesbrought about because two countries share the same inadequate source of water.

  • Foreign Language Learning and Cultural Exchange

Teachers of foreign languages have also used virtual worlds as places where students can practice language in simulated environmentswhere they canfind and speak with native speakers. In addition, worlds with international appeal, such as Second Life, offer opportunities for students to meet and converse with people from other countries and cultures. Second Life spaces like the English Village encourage learners of English and native speakers to meet, congregate, and learn from one another. The interactive language apartment, developed by Dayton Elseth and Bryan Carter of Central Missouri State University, is a more targeted environment that helps beginning German learners by contextualizing everyday words and grammatical patterns in a simulated German apartment.

  • Ethnographic and Social Science Research

Virtual Worlds are also being used as an object of study. Second Life, with its vibrant in-world economy, provideseasy means for self-expression and identity creation, and its world-wide accessibility make it an intriguing area for researchers and students alike to study. Communications professor Ed Lamoureux from Bradley University has his students conduct field research on Second Life. In his course, students study the virtual communities and communities of practice within the virtual world to understand both social science research methods and the development of this new cultural phenomena.

  • And More.

See: http://sleducation.wikispaces.com/educationaluses#language for an excellent overview of the breadth of educational uses of virtual worlds being explored in Second Life.

What is Being done with Virtual Worlds on the Urbana Campus?

There are a number of educators and researchers looking at how virtual worlds can be applied to education on the Urbana campus.

  • Sharon Tettegah from the department of Curriculum and Instruction has been a pioneering researcher on the use of virtual worlds in education. Professor Tettegah has taught classes in and on Second Life and other virtual environments and is currently researching issues of identity, cognition, and teaching and learning in virtual worlds.
  • The Graduate School of Library and Information Science is offering a number of continuing education courses in conjunction with the Illinois Alliance Library System on librarianship and education in virtual worlds. These classes are being conducted in Second Life and cover a number of topics from getting started in Second Life to conducting classes in a virtual world.
  • CITES Computer Assisted Instruction Specialist Alfred Weiss has been conducting research on how the virtual learning spaces in Second Life offer educators and learners new opportunities for teaching and learning.
  • Guy Garnett and Roy Campbell in the department of Computer Science taught a multidisciplinary class on creating computer-based art projects in Second Life and other virtual environments.

Where Can I find out More?

Contact a consultant at CITES Educational Technology by calling 244-7000 or sending an e-mail to edtech@illinois.edu.