Design and Representation of the Virtual Campus as a Place

Virtual worlds as places are networked environments that may look like the physical world as well as create a sense of place for a person to communicate, navigate, and do things. The virtual world, as a basis for creating a virtual learning environment, has the advantages of providing a familiar and rich environment that is inherently collaborative. The familiarity comes from the likeness of the virtual world to the physical world. The richness is possible through the design of the virtual world to have many of the characteristics of the physical world. The virtual world is inherently collaborative when awareness of other people in the world is included in the design. Virtual learning environments have used ideas from virtual worlds to varying degrees, including metaphorical references to a spatial world for navigational or organizational purposes. In this paper we present a framework for designing the virtual campus as a place that has the potential to provide as rich an environment for students studying in the virtual campus as the physical campus provides. The framework separates the design into three levels: the implementation level, the representation level, and the user interface level.