CyberOne landed front-page coverage in this week’s Boston Phoenix supplemental Education section. (See also “Does your life suck?,” earlier coverage from the Phoenix, and Virtual Marketing: Firms create online worlds as new way to reach big audiences in the Globe). Writes Kate Cohen, who attended one of our team meetings:
For those accustomed to traditional forms of online learning, the possibilities presented by a 3-D teaching environment make correspondence courses seem antiquated. “Distance students have a very disconnected feeling,” says Harvard Extension School instructor Rebecca Nesson, who will be teaching her first class [CyberOne] in Second Life this fall. For the extension school’s typical Web-based courses, a student might check in with an instructor from time to time, but interaction among peers can be iffy, with no set protocol for making it happen.
Of course, MUVEs aren’t the only solution to the feeling of disconnection that distance students often feel — at Legal Aid University we’ve been using WebEx and other synchronous tools to enhance the learning experience for students from the beginning. Insofar as one considers MUVEs as a supplement to standard distance courses, the critical questions are (1) how much MUVEs strengthen the community among students; and (2) whether these communities can thrive with minimal push from the teacher. Both are ultimately questions about cost-effectiveness: the first presumes that in-person events are the gold standard, but that an immersive environment can be almost as good and certainly cheaper; the second that students can truly teach each other, shifting the burden (and expense) off the teacher.
What’s really exciting about the potential of MUVEs, though, is moving beyond the traditional e-learning model into activities that simply aren’t possible in any other medium. We’ll be experimenting with some of these in CyberOne as well… more on this to come…
