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…

The Internet has disrupted or threatened to disrupt the traditional business models in many different areas, including publishing, record companies, retail sales, motion pictures, and advertising. One potential source of disruption for higher education is online learning, especially the recent focus on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Can…

The authors describe the University of Central Florida's top-down/bottom-up action analytics approach to using data to inform decision-making at the University of Central Florida. The top-down approach utilizes information about programs, modalities, and college implementation of Web initiatives. The bottom-up approach continuously monitors…

The New Media Consortium's Horizon Project is an ongoing research project that aims to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative inquiry within education around the globe over a five-year time period. The project's central products are the "Horizon Reports", an annual…