E-learning in virtual communities

In recent years many systems for distance learning have been developed. Even though students have access to learning material any time and any place, current tools for e-learning still have their limitations. The main shortcoming, compared to real life learning is the limited opportunity for human like interaction between student, teacher and material. This lack of multimodal communication limits one’s sense of being a member of an academic community. Virtual communities offer a challenging opportunity to solve this shortcoming. In this paper we report about a virtual community for e-learning using serious gaming technology. This virtual community is the first step to a virtual University, a virtual community for academic learning. The virtual community will be populated by agents representing students, teachers and campus employees. These agents are autonomous or controlled by users. We focus on multimodal communication between agents realized by game technology. And interaction between agents and the virtual world realized by waypoints in the simulated world. The design and implementation of the communication model will be presented and the first test results of a user experiment will be reported.Intelligent SystemsElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc