Supporting Education in Virtual Worlds with Virtual Learning Environments
The Faculty of Medicine (Undergraduate Medicine) has been successful in a bid on the Learning and Teaching Innovation Grants from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). This project is led by University of West Scotland and it will run from July 2010 to June 2011.
Aims
The project aims to promote integration between the open source Moodle Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) and Second Life and OpenSim virtual worlds – making it possible, for example, to build immersive settings around existing VLE content, and to use the VLE to provide greater accessibility to immersive content. A small number of descriptive case-studies have been published on the use of SLOODLE, but these only begin to touch on the pedagogical possibilities and opportunities now available – in particular in light of recent developments in virtual world technology.
This project will analyse and catalogue emerging pedagogical opportunities offered by integrating virtual worlds (Second Life) and virtual learning environments (Moodle) using the features developed by the SLOODLE project. The project also aims to shows how the relative strengths of each platform i.e. administrative capabilities of VLEs and the presentation layer of virtual worlds can be exploited and subsequently enhanced through integration.
The Faculty of Medicine will be involved in the development, evaluation and dissemination of effective models of best practice, where little guidance currently exists, based on experiences in practical usage of this integrated approach for teaching applications from multiple institutions.
Partners
The project partners are:
- University of the West of Scotland (Lead partner)
- Imperial College London
- The Open University
- University of Ulster.
Further Information
- For more information please visit the Supporting Education in Virtual Worlds with Virtual Learning Environments (VW/VLE) site.
