Design Considerations for Virtual Classroom and Laboratory Environments

With the ever-increasing demand for distance education one of the key challenges facing faculty is not only delivering effective instruction through both lecture-style and laboratory means, but also giving students an environment with a sense of presence. The key challenge here is to improve on the distance student‟s capabilities for interaction and collaboration thereby enhancing their ability to work in more group and team settings. In short, virtual environments present distance students with exciting new forums for meeting and sharing their thoughts and ideas in real-time. Today‟s virtual environments like Second Life (SL) provide students with open-ended opportunities for exploration and invention. This has broad reaching implications for faculty, and allows for the delivery of course content in stimulating and highly engaging manners. However, before these virtual environments can be implemented as academic tools, virtual spaces in the form of classrooms and laboratories need to be designed and developed to facilitate student and faculty interaction. This effort describes considerations made when designing some of the early virtual classroom and laboratory spaces developed within a newly established virtual campus. Once these spaces were built, class sessions were conducted and the students were surveyed in order to document their first impressions of the experience. Finally, the survey responses are analyzed and consideration is made for the establishment of design criteria for further virtual site development