A new, one-year project will set the bar for virtual educational tools as the University of Texas brings 16 campuses into the Second Life world with its Transforming Undergraduate Education system. This plan by researcher and educator Dr. Leslie Jarmon (SL: Bluewave Ogee), recently received a grant to fund the project for a year.

They will explore the use of virtual worlds for learning, as well as being a testbed for large educational centers to collaborate, teach, learn and share information in a virtual environment. Already the project is building on collaboration efforts by creating their archipegalo next to the SciLands continent, which is dedicated to science and technology.

The goals of UT System Transforming Undergraduate Education initiative require that a winning project must enrich quality of the learning experience, simultaneously lower costs of delivery of instruction, and useable across a very diverse array of campus environments (9 academic campuses; 6 medical health science center campuses). Second Life aligns with those goals in several very concrete ways. Most importantly, it¹s what I¹ve called an embodied rapid collaboration platform, providing researchers, instructors, students, staff, and administrators access to one another in very new ways across geo-spatial and brick and mortar boundaries. Second Life itself is an open-ended complex learning system, with massive user created content, continuously moving the horizon of what known or understood. Finally, and powerfully, Second Life gives educators and students the developers tools, thereby making Second Life a tool-making tool itself. It has inherent robustness.

Linden Lab put out a press release describing the project and their involvement in it:

Today, Linden Lab, the Makers of Second Life and Second Life Work are announcing the first statewide rollout of a virtual learning environment in the world. The Transforming Undergraduate Education Program, at the University of Texas System, recently awarded a grant to fund the initiation of a pioneering statewide virtual learning community of students, faculty, researchers and administrators in Second Life, that offers an innovative, low-cost approach to undergraduate instruction.

“The System’s virtual collaborative learning community of students, faculty, researchers, and administrators will allow participants to learn, share, collaborate and grow alongside one another,” said Leslie Jarmon, Ph.D. , the primary investigator for this statewide virtual initiative for the University of Texas 16-campus System, and a Faculty Development Specialist and Senior Lecturer in the Division of Instructional Innovation & Assessment (CIE/DIIA) at the University of Texas at Austin. “Step by step in this evolving system-wide virtual learning community, all of these players—and especially our undergraduates—will be seen as learners with expanded roles: learners as scientists, learners as designers, learners as researchers, learners as communicators, and learners as collaborators. We see endless possibilities on the virtual learning horizon.”