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…

In this article we present a partially realized project for building a distributed learning environment for studying digital circuits Test and Diagnostics at TU-Sofia. We describe the main requirements for this environment, substantiate the developer platform choice, and present our simulation and circuit parameter calculation tools.…

Web3D presents many opportunities for learners in a virtual world or virtual environment over the web. This is a great opportunity for open-distance education institutions to benefit from web3d technologies to create courses with interactive 3d materials. There are many open source and commercial products offering 3d technologies over the web…

Second Life (SL) is a user-created virtual environment with possible merit for teaching and learning in higher education. In this article, two teacher educators reflect on their initial development in SL, considering the ways they worked within SL to meet their differing instructional needs and the ways they prepared students for these learning…

The virtual online world called Second Life can be deceptive. It looks like a game, but the participants are not assigned goals. Indeed, it may be said that the goal of Second Life is to create one's own goals. As a result, the residents of Second Life choose to work in many different directions. Some choose to develop land; some try to earn…

Web-based distance learning is a relatively new approach in higher education which is gaining in popularity. Because a Web-based classroom is so different than a traditional face-to-face classroom, the variables that influence success or satisfaction with such a course may be different than those in a face-to-face course. We investigated whether…

With the advances in Internet technologies, online education is fast gaining ground as an extension to traditional education. Webcast allows lectures conducted on campus to be viewed by students located at remote sites by streaming the audio and video content over Internet Protocol (IP) networks. However when used alone, webcast does not provide…