Innovate (www.innovateonline.info) is published bimonthly as a public
service by the Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova
Southeastern University and is sponsored, in part, by Microsoft. 
The August/September issue includes articles on the role of virtual
realities in (and as) the classroom, an article on one university's
efforts to ensure that faculty members get the support and
encouragement they need to produce consistently high-quality online
courses, and an article that describes a business school's development
of a computer-based testing lab to accommodate their growing
enrollment.

In our first article, Ulrich Rauch, Marvin Cohodas, and Tim Wang
describe the Arts Metaverse, a virtual learning environment for the
three-dimensional reconstruction of important archeological artifacts
and sites, allowing students access to places and works they would not
otherwise be able to experience. In addition, students may create
reconstructions as well as visiting particular sites. Embracing the
principle that engaging students in the construction of a virtual
teaching and learning environment can create a participative learning
experience, the Arts Metaverse Project aims to enable students and
academics to become joint researchers in creating and sharing
knowledge beyond the walls of the university. See
http://tinyurl.com/l438lx 

Our next two articles describe efforts to create learning
environments in Second Life. Mary Anne Clark offers a map to Genome
Island, a virtual laboratory complex constructed for teaching genetics
to university undergraduates, Genome Island also provides a public
space where anyone interested in genetics can spend a few minutes or a
few hours interacting with genetic objects. See
http://tinyurl.com/mwuuy6 

Anne Hewitt, Susan Spencer, Danielle Mirliss, and Riad Twal report on
a collaborative initiative to create a virtual simulation exercise
focused on key competencies for students in a Master of Healthcare
Administration program. The exercise they design provides a previously
unavailable virtual counterpart to the tabletop exercises
traditionally used to teach emergency preparedness, allowing online
students to gain important hands-on experience and opportunities for
interaction. See http://tinyurl.com/koqvkw 

Albert A. Angehrn and Katrina Maxwell describe a simulation that does
not rely on a virtual world. Rather, their simulation, designed to
teach collaboration skills to managers and decision makers, relies on
an episodic video story to create a simulation narrative.
Participants, who may be online or on site, use group decision support
technology to facilitate their collaboration with a small team around
a series of mission-critical dilemmas; the decision a team makes at
each juncture determines how the narrative develops. The simulation
provides a learning experience that can help managers, decision
makers, virtual teams, and online communities reflect about the
challenges and opportunities of collaboration and group decision
making. See http://tinyurl.com/kl7swd 

Next, Hong Wang, Lawrence Gould, and Dennis King share the
comprehensive approach their university has developed to quality
assurance in online education. A central component of their program is
effective cooperation among administrative, professional, and peer
support systems to guide faculty members in creating and administering
quality online courses. Through these efforts, Wang, Gould, and King
argue, their university has developed a collaborative course
development process that provides faculty members the support they
need to design and administer high quality online instruction. See
http://tinyurl.com/l62f2b 

Patrick Moskal, Richard Caldwell, and Taylor Ellis describe the
development and evolution of a computer-based assessment lab at their
college of business administration, detail the lessons learned from
their experiences in developing the lab and accommodating continued
growth, and discuss plans for further development. As a result of
sound initial planning and continual development in response to
faculty and student needs, the facility has been remarkably successful
in streamlining the administration of assessments for CBA, presenting
a model for other institutions considering implementing computer-based
assessment on a large scale. See http://tinyurl.com/ndddtu

In Innovate-Ideagora this month, Denise Easton and Alan McCord
announce the consolidation of Innovate-Live, Innovate's venue for
author webcasts, with Ideagora; webcasts and webcast archives will now
be accessed through Ideagora's home page. Noting a pattern in the
nearly 50 discussions currently active on Ideagora, McCord and Easton
suggest a list of five core issues driving change in education.
Readers are invited to contribute to an Ideagora discussion about this
list by suggesting their own list or by exploring how technology may
shape an approach to these questions. See http://tinyurl.com/lgl3b5

We hope that you enjoy this issue. Please use the discussion board
within each article to raise questions or provide additional
commentary. Your comments will be sent to authors for their response,
which will become part of the record for their article. Also, please
forward this announcement to appropriate mailing lists and to
colleagues who want to use IT tools to advance their work. Please ask
your organizational librarian to link to Innovate in their resource
section for open-access e-journals.

Thanks!

Jim
----
James L Morrison
Editor-in-Chief, Innovate
http://www.innovateonline.info
Fischler School of Education and Human Services
Nova Southeastern University
http://www.schoolofed.nova.edu/home.htm