Sloan-C Effective Practices in Second Life

The Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) works "to help learning organizations continually improve quality, scale, and breadth of their online programs, according to their own distinctive missions, so that education will become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines." Over the past several weeks - from my perspective at least - members of that organization have worked to begin Sloan-C's involvement with and support of teaching and learning in virtual environments, Second Life in particular.

Tonight, I attended a SL-NET, as it's been dubbed, meeting to begin discussions on how Sloan-C might best support RL education in SL. The turnout was impressive and quite exciting: 22-25 participants. After introductions and an overview of the potential groups, we separated into smaller, personally selected interest groups. Of course, the group in which I was most interested focused on effective practices in Second Life.

The conversation was definitely interesting, and with the concerns I've expressed in this space previously, it's encouraging to be involved with a group of individuals concerned with defining, demonstrating and promoting effective teaching and learning in Second Life. It's not that others are not concerned, but I've not yet encountered many conversations or individuals explicitly attempting to define what does or does not constitute effective, quality use of Second Life as a formal learning environment. Somewhat expected for a first meeting, we spent much of our time focused on the logistics of the group - how to maintain communications in the future, who the designated chair or co-chairs for the committee may be - but we did spend some time talking about the concepts of quality teaching and learning and how to collect and communicate examples of effective practice.

The idea for the committee is to (paraphrased/librally-quoted from a summary email by Ragitake/SL):

lead a research, gathering, and dissemination initiative. The idea is to build upon the Sloan-C Effective Practices Library, with an additional (or separate) section for Second Life. The committee will draw from the methodologies used by Sloan-C to establish a critical mass of effective practices in online education to establish the same information for teaching and learning in Second Life. The committee proposes to initiate discussions on effective practices as well as survey Sloan-C members (and perhaps others) who are or are planning to teach in Second Life and gather successful methods, activities, approaches and participant-submitted case studies.

I think the process begins with defining and vetting criteria that identify effective teaching and learning in Second Life. That's a tremendous task, but after several conversations about the definition I've offered previously, I think it presents, at least, a start to the conversation. With that task complete, it becomes possible to collect samples and build a portfolio of effective teaching practice.

The event was well organized and effectively facilitated; it was a fantastic job by Floria. It's certainly an exciting project with which to be involved. If you have interest in this project or any other Sloan-C related SL activities, contact me at topher (at) muveforward (dot) com. I'll get you in touch with the appropriate individuals (rather than posting their information here). And, there's a few more pictures here >