Student Orientation

Learning experiences within Multi User Virtual Environments (MUVE’s) focus on discovery and active experiences and provide many opportunities to support multicultural learners. Virtual worlds have the potential to become meaningful, highly sophisticated tools for educators and students, and it is timely to consider how educators can move from the hype to the how and why? Consideration needs to be given to the characteristics of meaningful pedagogical activities that move learners from playing to an enhanced learning experience? This paper presents a case study in which the MUVE Second Life was used to support a First Life (Real-World) orientation programme for students within the School of Hotel and Tourism Management at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Presented is an overview of the approach, rationale for the use of Second Life as well as lessons learned in relation to the application of virtual worlds for learners within the Hong Kong context. The study concludes that the S...

In response to the spread of the Covid‑19 pandemic, the President of South Africa declared a national lockdown that commenced on 27 March 2020. This posed numerous challenges to the higher education sector, one of which was the preparation of students forced to stay at home to be able to study remotely under unique and often unfavourable circumstances. This article outlines and reflects on the conceptualisation, development, and implementation of an online orientation programme aimed at preparing students to rapidly move to emergency remote learning as a result of a nationwide lockdown. Teaching and Learning Centre staff in the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management at a South African university rapidly created a short online orientation programme in the institutional Learning Management System, using Salmon’s five-stage model as a conceptual framework. The objective was to enable students to acquire the skills and knowledge required for continuing with the university academic prog...

Active learning strategies, which prioritize student engagement and collaborative inquiry, are increasingly advocated to enhance learning outcomes in higher education. However, their implementation in large classroom settings, particularly in resourceconstrained contexts like Bangladeshi colleges, remains underexplored. This phenomenological qualitative study investigates the challenges teachers face when integrating active learning strategies in overcrowded classrooms and examines adaptive solutions they employ to overcome these barriers. Data were collected through in-depth interviews and a focus group discussion with eight college instructors from two institutions in Feni district, Bangladesh, where classrooms frequently exceed 200 students. Findings reveal significant challenges, including inadequate infrastructure, time constraints, difficulties in monitoring participation, and students' heterogeneous skill levels. Teachers also reported systemic issues such as limited institutional support, insufficient training, and rigid curricular demands. Despite these obstacles, instructors developed context-specific strategies, such as reorganizing seating into collaborative clusters, leveraging social media and flipped classrooms for pre-class engagement, integrating low-cost digital tools (e.g., projectors and WhatsApp), and employing peer-assisted learning to manage large groups. The study highlights the critical role of teacher agency in adapting active learning methods, emphasizing the need for localized professional development programs and institutional reforms, such as classroom size reduction and continuous assessment integration. These findings contribute to global discourse on active learning by underscoring the interplay between pedagogical innovation and socioeconomic constraints in the Global South. Recommendations include policy interventions to enhance teacher training, infrastructure investment, and curriculum flexibility to foster sustainable active learning practices in Bangladesh's tertiary education sector.

In response to the spread of the Covid‑19 pandemic, the President of South Africa declared a national lockdown that commenced on 27 March 2020. This posed numerous challenges to the higher education sector, one of which was the preparation of students forced to stay at home to be able to study remotely under unique and often unfavourable circumstances. This article outlines and reflects on the conceptualisation, development, and implementation of an online orientation programme aimed at preparing students to rapidly move to emergency remote learning as a result of a nationwide lockdown. Teaching and Learning Centre staff in the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management at a South African university rapidly created a short online orientation programme in the institutional Learning Management System, using Salmon’s five-stage model as a conceptual framework. The objective was to enable students to acquire the skills and knowledge required for continuing with the university academic prog...

In response to the spread of the Covid‑19 pandemic, the President of South Africa declared a national lockdown that commenced on 27 March 2020. This posed numerous challenges to the higher education sector, one of which was the preparation of students forced to stay at home to be able to study remotely under unique and often unfavourable circumstances. This article outlines and reflects on the conceptualisation, development, and implementation of an online orientation programme aimed at preparing students to rapidly move to emergency remote learning as a result of a nationwide lockdown. Teaching and Learning Centre staff in the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management at a South African university rapidly created a short online orientation programme in the institutional Learning Management System, using Salmon’s five-stage model as a conceptual framework. The objective was to enable students to acquire the skills and knowledge required for continuing with the university academic prog...

In response to the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, the President of South Africa declared a national lockdown that commenced on 27 March 2020. This posed numerous challenges to the higher education sector, one of which was the preparation of students forced to stay at home to be able to study remotely under unique and often unfavourable circumstances. This article outlines and reflects on the conceptualisation, development, and implementation of an online orientation programme aimed at preparing students to rapidly move to emergency remote learning as a result of a nationwide lockdown. Teaching and Learning Centre staff in the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management at a South African university rapidly created a short online orientation programme in the institutional Learning Management System, using Salmon's five-stage model as a conceptual framework. The objective was to enable students to acquire the skills and knowledge required for continuing with the university academic programme from 20 April 2020 via emergency remote learning. The orientation programme covered the priority areas of how to get started in emergency remote learning, broad study skills, how to use the required technologies for learning, and managing personal well-being during social isolation and emergency remote learning. In this article, the conceptualisation and development of the orientation programme is analysed, before reflecting on its implementation, challenges, mitigating measures, and lessons learned. Feedback from students indicates that the majority of students felt more prepared for continuing the academic programme, although they still reported feeling anxious about the many uncertainties. The intervention emerges as a useful strategy for helping students transition during a crisis and contributes to the understanding of how to prepare students for rapid transition to Emergency Remote Learning.

Traditionally, higher education institutions have developed orientation programs that are designed to help students make a successjul transition to college. Now, considering this flow of virtual students, universities offiring distance learning programs have to design orientation programs suited for the students that will take distance courses, this article introduces the issues to be considered in designing an orientation for students in online programs and presents the strategies being used currently in some Internet-based courses. Orientation for online courses serve the same objectives as orientation for college, in the seme that it can facilitate academic and social interactions, increase student involvement, enhance the sense of belonging to a virtual learning community, and help retention.

This empirical study evaluates comments provided by first year undergraduate students from an English for Technical and Web-Based Writing (ETWW) course at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (HK PolyU) from the second semester of the 2009/2010 academic year. Students were asked to describe their experiences with an inclass task consisting of creating a movie poster, and then responding to and evaluating each other's work in a showcase area designed within the HK PolyU Second Life (SL) virtual campus. Sources of student comments considered included HK PolyU iFeedback forms and video-recorded focus group sessions. The information was then filtered for facilitation of other possibilities in language learning. The authors examine how these activities could be applied in a collaborative learning environment and other collaborative contexts. The goal of this study is to show the creative abilities of students from a technical writing course to think beyond the technical writing classroom. Creating activities of this nature can not only substantiate claims of practical applicability from a virtual world into the physical world, but also acknowledges the benefits of threedimensional platforms over two-dimensional platforms. While some of the ideas This is the Pre-Published Version. 2 mentioned (like creating and featuring films in three-dimensional virtual environments) are not novel, they are relevant in showing the quick adaptability of first year university students-many of whom have little to no knowledge of SL, and who tend to view virtual worlds simply as another 'game'-in creative thinking and learning. Additionally, the authors consider the relationships between extension projects and the in-class poster task, and the implications of these projects for a potential virtual Department of English.

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I. INTRODUCTION Game-based scenarios are an innovative approach to en-hance the learning process in terms of an improved learning outcome. They can be realized in different educational set-tings. Currently, the most popular scenario is computer-aided face-to-face learning. ...

172 The Educational affordances of Multi User Virtual Environments (MUVE) Paul Hollins and Sarah Robbins Keywords: Second Life, pedagogy, education, affordances, qualitative analysis Abstract: The emergence of the synthetic world or Multi User Virtual Environment (MUVE) ...

Following up on his 2007 ABOUT CAMPUS article, the author shares six more lessons he wishes he had known as a working-class, first-generation college student and argues that higher education should pay more attention to first-generation and class status among students, faculty, and staff.

Students who are the first in their family to enter higher education join a rarified and often mystifying culture of rules, rites, and rituals. A first-generation working-class college student who became a faculty member offers his insights and recommendations after forty years in the academy.

Because of my humble background, I experi-enced my socioeconomic status (SES) as a lack of cul-tural capital as I headed off to college. Cultural capital is the knowledge, skills, education, and other advan-tages a person has that make the educational system a ...

This paper argues that student orientation (SO) is a high order construct that should be measured formatively rather than reflectively. Using a discovery-oriented approach, conducted by supplementing educational and marketing literatures with in depth interviews from 23 academic staff in seven different universities, the authors identified three second-order formative constructs and one first-order reflective construct to measure the concept of SO. The study then developed a self-administrated survey to validate the four identified constructs that form SO. Through using rigours statistical analysis, the study confirms that the measurement instrument for SO is the 53-item which can be validly and reliably measured using the nine multi-item components of: Measuring and Adapting Teaching Practices, Promoting Best Teaching Practices, Assessment and Feedback, Adopting Outside-In-Approach, Student Engagement, Employer Engagement Initiatives, Intrafunctional Coordination, Interfunctional Coordination and Effective Personal Tutoring System. The effect of SO on student satisfaction and university reputation was also hypothesised and tested using a structural equation modelling (SmartPLS 2.0).

Students currently in higher education in the industrialised world have unprecedented access to web-based technologies and tools, and are likely to have engaged with online activities throughout their educational experiences. More widely, there is increasing pressure on universities to provide flexible learning environments and access to resources. This is keenly felt in the computer laboratory, where once dedicated, stand-alone machines provided software packages for students to work on during timetabled sessions. In recognising the move away from such patterns, Macquarie University is developing software and infrastructure to enable distributed access at any time to students, thus making a conceptual and physical shift from so-called 'Local Area Networking' to 'Wide Area Networking' and enabling greater freedom of access. The initiative is from within the Division of Economics and Financial Studies (EFS), but is applicable to students of any discipline in any university. This paper describes the development and discusses some of the implications for learning and teaching.

172 The Educational affordances of Multi User Virtual Environments (MUVE) Paul Hollins and Sarah Robbins Keywords: Second Life, pedagogy, education, affordances, qualitative analysis Abstract: The emergence of the synthetic world or Multi User Virtual Environment (MUVE) ...

Faulty group processes have harmful effects on performance but there is little research about intervention protocols to pre-empt them in higher education. This naturalistic experiment compared a control cohort with an inducted cohort. The inducted cohort attended a workshop, consultations, elected a leader and used tools (a group log and group contract) designed to minimize social loafing, optimize coordination (by boosting good information sampling) and orient group dynamics towards the task. In the absence of inductions, a faulty system of processes was in play and this had a significant impact on group performance. In contrast, the inductions created a buffer. Structural equation modeling showed that the intervention made both group cohesion and conflict beneficial to group performance. The induction protocols enhanced students’ individual accountability, a sense of unique responsibility and dissent during group decision-making (which improved its quality). The implication is that inductions help optimize the processes within student teamwork.

2013 4 5 Dedication To Hugo and Estela, they are my main wellspring for continued insight, growth, true joy, and a gentler heart. 6 7 With so much controversy in the air, it's understandable that only a few teachers and schools make the attempt.

Following the adoption of the virtual world Second Life by tertiary educational institutions worldwide, a limited study was conducted at the Hong Kong Polytechn ic University to test the feasibility and desirability of employing a virtual envir onment to conduct classes. Thirty tutorials were held in Second Life over a period of f ive wee s in support of a course on Media Studies with sixty students. Feedbac was gathered continuously from students and the lecturer via informal interviews, feedbac forms, and participant observation. The results did not support most of the hypotheses, but supported the value of virtual teaching and learning in a wellsupported institutional environment. The paper emphasizes the need to integrate virtual environments into the educational framewor of courses and for a careful consideration of the educational aims and uses of virtual worlds within specific courses.

CTER, a five-year-old online Master of Education, organizes an orientation for all the new students admitted into the online program every year. This presentation introduces the strategies followed to organize, design, develop, deliver and evaluate the orientation program. The study includes design considerations, explanation of the objectives, details in the development and implementation, and features of the evaluation.

Today’s education is characterized by the need to adapt teaching – learning processes to the new social, demographic and cultural reality arisen from changes society has undergone in recent decades. This need encompasses several aspects, of which this paper focuses on teacher training. We put forward the incorporation of 3D learning environments or MMOL (Massively Multiuser Online Learning) platforms to favor the creation of 3D scenarios where the teachers can improve their teaching-pedagogical skills for situations of cultural and ethical concerns that require a high level of contextualization. We have organized the study and improvement of those skills related to three characteristic situations: cultural diversity, values education and attention to diversity. This paper is centered on teachers and students of secondary education enrolled at the Castilla La Mancha (Spain) Institutes. The ultimate aim is to demonstrate whether the MMOL platforms can improve such skills training teachers in virtual and/or augmented reality simulators

Executive Summary
Due to its unique range of creative, experimental and commercial possibilities, the online persistent virtual world Second Life is attracting significant interest from business and service industry sectors throughout the world. Big name brands such as IBM, Dell, ING, Philips Electronics, Telstra, and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation have entered this immersive environment.
Though return-on-investment is not readily measured, canny early adopters are realising the potential in understanding how virtual worlds work, particularly in regard to social networks and peer-to-peer exchange. For this reason, active engagement with residents, one which goes beyond merely establishing a shop front, is advocated.
Second Life is emerging as test bed for new ideas, where real world prototypes can be released at low cost, with direct feedback from users significantly enriching the design process and leading to innovative or unexpected results. The process is enhanced by the nature of its residents who, typically, are techno-savvy, playful and demonstrate a high receptivity to new ideas.
Many residents are classified as user-producers, which is why the lead innovation models come not from real world companies hoping to import their services but from the in-world eco-system where virtual start-ups have sprung up to support residents. The demand for virtual products and services, underpinned by a digital rights management arrangement where creators of in-world content retain their IP, has spawned new businesses in the area of content creation, retail, conference and event hosting, land development, media services and financial services.
While virtual businesses can be profitable, few are significantly so, as they deal in Linden currency which amounts to mere micro-payments (L$275 = approx US$1). However in-world service providers deserve close attention as their methods shed light on ways in which social networks and peer-to-peer exchange drives trade. This points the way ahead for real world businesses seeking to monetise services in today‟s „pull-driven‟ consumer environment. Virtual-to-virtual business methods may well lead the thinking in devising business models for future 3D web-based services, particularly as add-ons to the „mirror worlds‟ of Google Earth and Microsoft‟s Virtual Earth emerge.

This paper outlines the development and use of a virtual hotel for teaching hotel operations through e-simulations.
Graduates from hotel schools beginning work in the hotel industry need an appropriate mix of technical knowledge, skills
and attitudes. However, many university courses in hotel management are theoretical, and instructors have difficulty in
developing students’ technical and interpersonal skills to work effectively in a service environment. The virtual hotel
provides hotel management instructors with a realistic hotel setting, offering challenges and scenarios that allow students
to apply their theoretical learning to a range of realistic hotel situations, and develop their problem-solving and workplace
skills. The virtual hotel is an active learning tool that can be used by different classes and instructors to enhance learning
and skills application, and help students prepare and respond to real world situations in a non-threatening way.

This paper reports on the development of “Virtel,” a virtual hotel for hospitality teaching and learning through e-simulations, from a pedagogical perspective. Active learning, with a strong reflective element, and teacher guided discussion will be a valuable asset to our range of teaching methods. Virtel aims to help teachers provide a realistic hospitality setting, and provide challenges and scenarios that allow students to apply their theoretical learning to situations, develop their thinking skills and develop their workplace skills. Virtel is an active learning tool that could be used by different classes and lecturers to enhance learning and skills application, and help students to face realistic workplace scenarios, and learn how to prepare and respond to live situations in a non-threatening way.

The main purpose of this paper is to present draft guidelines for best practice to form online Three Dimensional (3D) Multi-Users Virtual Environments (MUVE) for education in developing countries. The researcher has introduced Second Life (SL) to graduate students in Bangkok for educational purposes. The best practices refined from relevant documents and research results are presented under four aspects of its management: human, instruction, technology and social (HITS model). The situation in Thailand is similar to other developing countries where the capital city has good and sufficient infrastructure but most people find it more convenient to use the national language rather than English. The obvious barrier, namely, insufficient Internet bandwidth when accessed online 3D MUVE has been found as one of the fundamental issues.

Virtual worlds are a phenomenon raising interest among educators around the globe, with more than 500 educational institutions experimenting with, or offering classes in, the virtual world of Second Life. While many educators are excited about the potential of virtual worlds, others are wary or skeptical. Some consider them as upmarket games, while others are afraid they will degrade student learning. Virtual worlds are certainly not a panacea for higher education, and they present many challenges for students, teachers, and administrators. This article describes how Second Life has been used for teaching and learning in a hospitality and tourism school in Hong Kong. It discusses some of the opportunities, challenges, and problems of using this virtual environment and analyzes data collected from students and teachers who used Second Life for learning and teaching in four diverse courses. The article concludes by suggesting strategies and techniques for using virtual worlds effectively in hospitality and tourism education.

Learning experiences within Multi User Virtual Environments (MUVE’s) focus on discovery and active experiences and provide many opportunities to support multicultural learners. Virtual worlds have the potential to become meaningful, highly sophisticated tools for educators and students, and it is timely to consider how educators can move from the hype to the how and why? Consideration needs to be given to the characteristics of meaningful pedagogical activities that move learners from playing to an enhanced learning experience? This paper presents a case study in which the MUVE Second Life was used to support a First Life (Real-World) orientation programme for students within the School of Hotel and Tourism Management at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Presented is an overview of the approach, rationale for the use of Second Life as well as lessons learned in relation to the application of virtual worlds for learners within the Hong Kong context. The study concludes that the Second Life orientation programme was not as successful as envisioned. However, the specific lessons learned, and ‘moments’ of intervention and further assistance identified have provided rich material and an emerging interest’ in relation to the incorporation of Second Life into meaningful educational activities in the university.

Keywords: Game Based Learning, Virtual Worlds, MUVE, Second Life, Higher Education