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The August/September issue includes articles on the role of virtual realities in (and as) the classroom, an article on one university's efforts to ensure that faculty members get the support and encouragement they need to produce consistently high-quality online courses, and an article that describes a business school's development of a computer-based testing lab to accommodate their growing enrollment.
In our first article, Ulrich Rauch, Marvin Cohodas, and Tim Wang describe the Arts Metaverse, a virtual learning environment for the three-dimensional reconstruction of important archeological artifacts and sites, allowing students access to places and works they would not otherwise be able to experience. In addition, students may create reconstructions as well as visiting particular sites. Embracing the principle that engaging students in the construction of a virtual teaching and learning environment can create a participative learning experience, the Arts Metaverse Project aims to enable students and academics to become joint researchers in creating and sharing knowledge beyond the walls of the university.
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Our next two articles describe efforts to create learning environments in Second Life. Mary Anne Clark offers a map to Genome Island, a virtual laboratory complex constructed for teaching genetics to university undergraduates, Genome Island also provides a public space where anyone interested in genetics can spend a few minutes or a few hours interacting with genetic objects.
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Anne Hewitt, Susan Spencer, Danielle Mirliss, and Riad Twal report on a collaborative initiative to create a virtual simulation exercise focused on key competencies for students in a Master of Healthcare Administration program. The exercise they design provides a previously unavailable virtual counterpart to the tabletop exercises traditionally used to teach emergency preparedness, allowing online students to gain important hands-on experience and opportunities for interaction.
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Albert A. Angehrn and Katrina Maxwell describe a simulation that does not rely on a virtual world. Rather, their simulation, designed to teach collaboration skills to managers and decision makers, relies on an episodic video story to create a simulation narrative. Participants, who may be online or on site, use group decision support technology to facilitate their collaboration with a small team around a series of mission-critical dilemmas; the decision a team makes at each juncture determines how the narrative develops. The simulation provides a learning experience that can help managers, decision makers, virtual teams, and online communities reflect about the challenges and opportunities of collaboration and group decision making.
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Next, Hong Wang, Lawrence Gould, and Dennis King share the comprehensive approach their university has developed to quality assurance in online education. A central component of their program is effective cooperation among administrative, professional, and peer support systems to guide faculty members in creating and administering quality online courses. Through these efforts, Wang, Gould, and King argue, their university has developed a collaborative course development process that provides faculty members the support they need to design and administer high quality online instruction.
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Patrick Moskal, Richard Caldwell, and Taylor Ellis describe the development and evolution of a computer-based assessment lab at their college of business administration, detail the lessons learned from their experiences in developing the lab and accommodating continued growth, and discuss plans for further development. As a result of sound initial planning and continual development in response to faculty and student needs, the facility has been remarkably successful in streamlining the administration of assessments for CBA, presenting a model for other institutions considering implementing computer-based assessment on a large scale.
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Innovate-Ideagora this month, Denise Easton and Alan McCord announce the consolidation of Innovate-Live, Innovate's venue for author webcasts, with Ideagora; webcasts and webcast archives will now be accessed through Ideagora's home page. Noting a pattern in the nearly 50 discussions currently active on Ideagora, McCord and Easton suggest a list of five core issues driving change in education. Readers are invited to contribute to an Ideagora discussion about this list by suggesting their own list or by exploring how technology may shape an approach to these questions.
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Please use the discussion board within each article to raise questions or provide additional commentary. Your comments will be sent to authors for their response, which will become part of the record for their article. Also, please forward this announcement to appropriate mailing lists and to colleagues who want to use IT tools to advance their work.
Enjoy this issue.
Thanks to Jim!
Source: Innovate
