Sussex students, staff and visitors will soon be flying around a computerised version of the campus to study, work, share information and socialise.
The 3D internet ‘island’ looks like the real Sussex campus. It can be visited by people who are signed up to the virtual world, Second Life.
Every user (called a resident) creates a virtual version of themselves (called an avatar) in Second Life, which they can transport to different locations, such as the Sussex campus. Once they’ve arrived, they can fly around to visit the Library, attend online seminars, or call into the Students’ Union or Meeting House.
Tom Shaw, a graduate intern with the University’s in-house Web Team, developed the virtual campus with colleague Beth Granter.
He says: “We really wanted to make it look like Sussex, so instead of going for some fantasy look, we’ve recreated the centre of campus, including its distinctive Basil Spence architecture.”
Developers see the campus as a new platform for developing teaching, learning and communication tools that encourage interaction and collaboration between users.
Potential uses for the virtual campus, still in its developmental stages but open to explore, include:
Tom says: “The online campus allows University members and visitors to get more out of being part of a real community. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops as users sign up and get involved.
“We’ll now be working with academics and the University’s Creativity Zone [part of the Centre of Excellence in Teaching and Learning in Creativity] to improve learning and teaching opportunities online, as well as developing the social networking side of things.”
Dr Judith Good from the Informatics department is currently teaching a course that involves students creating educational experiences in Second Life for other institutions, such as further education colleges.
She says: “We are still exploring the potential usefulness of Second Life for teaching and learning, but we really wanted to push the boundaries with this project and get our students doing something exciting and innovative. It’s great that these projects might then find a home on the Sussex virtual campus.”
To find out more, see www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/secondlife