SOS: Extended Envs Supports for Expansion – an Educator’s Plea

This presentation will highlight some basic best practices that have emerged over 15 years of bringing higher education students into VR environments. Then, areas where additional support and community could help stand-alone educators (with little institutional support) bring open-sim environments to expanded audiences will be raised, seeking to operationalize wiki-like areas of communication that could bridge educators and technologist through important shared concerns. Topics integrate areas such as: professional and child-focused avatar creation, security, IT components, working with IT departments, institutional buy-in, instructional design support, and the like. The plea is to find collective and communal ways to share, develop and leverage a knowledge base that can facilitate conversations at the interstices of the expanding VR environments.