Open Source Meets Virtual Reality—An Instructor’s Journey Unearths New Opportunities for Learning,Community,and Academia

Abstract

Opening with the history, recent advances, and emerging ways to use avatar-based virtual reality, an instructor who has used virtual environments since 2007 shares how these environments bring more options to community building, teaching, and education. With the open-source movement, where the source code for virtual environments was made available to the public, greatly reduced prices and increased options are shifting dramatically the utility of virtual environments for developing student competencies as virtual creators; supporting faculty and organizational needs; enabling comprehensive curriculum, assessment, and design; and allowing for multipurpose virtual environments. Reporting changes to how she taught the development of virtual environments, the author explains the enhanced learning observed within a newly designed course and the improvements she will make in the future. Additional recommendations address how education, communication, and learning organizations can use improvements to implement multipurpose virtual environments and can support technology-facilitated design in general.