Avaya web.alive partnership
During 2009 the Centre for Learning Innovation partnered with Avaya to trial the use of an immersive learning or virtual world platform in a western Sydney school. The trial was evaluated by the Centre for Educational Research, University of Western Sydney.
Download a copy of the final project evaluation report (pdf 196 kB)
From the report:
Immersive learning environments when integrated into a classroom curriculum have the potential to provide an innovative learning environment and can transform educational practices. These environments provide opportunities and learning environments where students can engage with learning about areas of the curriculum that cannot be duplicated in a real classroom – virtual experiments, virtual visits (Dede, 2000). They also provide opportunities for students to interact with others across time and space allowing for collaboration with students located in other classrooms, in the same or different time zones, in the same space (classroom) or in another country, and also with experts. Immersive learning environments are one of the future directions for learning, for achieving educational outcomes, for transforming educational practices: across the curriculum, pedagogy and assessment.
Virtual world technologies are not just about virtual world experiences - they can be used to create a robust, safe learning platform where ‘natural’ collaboration is possible.
Typically, people associate virtual worlds with:
- experiencing an alternate reality such as Second Life,
- structured, multi-user immersive learning environments such as Quest Atlantis
- real life simulations used for training where cost or potential danger prohibits ‘live’ practice.
Yet the underpinning technology has huge potential for use as a mainstream elearning platform.
Virtual world technologies:
- support ‘crowd’ communication or multi-point to multi-point, in contrast to video conferencing, Skype and Connect environments, which generally support single point communication to multi-point
- support very detailed analytics as every action is an event that can be logged and analysed
- can manage risk rather than avoid risk
- deliver intelligent bandwidth use – you only receive data for the objects you can see and hear
- deliver equity of access and don’t require expensive dedicated hardware, such as video conference connections, allowing access to users desktops anywhere, anytime
- have the potential to transform education from preschool early intervention through to adult post-compulsory education
- deliver conduits to connect learners rather than containers to manage learners
- have huge potential to deliver a platform for a national languages program as they will allow the limited pool of Australian teachers to be dedicated to the task and facilitate links with native speakers.
In addition, Virtual Worlds:
- can incorporate intelligent agents to monitor behaviour or provide assistance
- have the potential to be recorded and replayed from any perspective
- can use live web cam video images as avatars to enhance the social interaction; you know who you are talking with because you can see them speak.
Here's a review of the Lenovo WebAlive environment known as eLounge, which was posted on You Tube by an independent media consultant.
