By Steven Piper
Editorial Intern
Virtual reality has now entered the realm of education. The Beach World, Cal State University, Long Beach’s (CSULB) new online island campus, is a virtual reality created to take the university and its students to new heights.
In the online world, individuals can create their own, semi-unique avatars— the virtual personifications of themselves.
Once the avatars are up and running, the participants can explore The Beach World. The island comes complete with classrooms and the Walter Pyramid. There is even a virtual duplication of The Beach on 2nd Street, CSULB’s retail store.
According to a press release from CSULB’s Office of Public Affairs, “Beach World was designed by faculty and students within CSULB’s College of Business Administration (CBA) to broaden the classroom setting, to augment the traditional in-classroom instruction and as a means to enable online distance education. It also provides faculty the ability to create and conduct research within a number of marketplace and learning environments.”
Marketing professor David Horne said the idea of a virtual reality started small. According to Horne, marketing professor Jonathan Lee thought of the idea for a virtual grocery store in which students could put their marketing skills to use.
However, the production of a virtual grocery store and all its products proved to be a huge task. With more than 50,000 items, 12 photos would have to be taken of each product to create a virtual duplication.
Instead, an MBA student and the project manager of The Beach World recommended using a building program called Second Life. “Someone suggested using Second Life because that is the easier platform to build off of,” Horne said. “Easier building blocks are available in Second Life.”
Even though the future uses of the online world are yet to be discovered, it’s anticipated to smooth the way for distance education. Horne said the world will also allow educators to cater to students’ different learning styles. He said it could also be used to foster community and relationship-building among students.
Marketing professor Sayantani Mukherjee recently utilized the virtual world when she had her students use one of the virtual classrooms to present their last assignment. “For the final project, students were required to design a marketing plan for the College of Business Administration (CBA), CSULB, that was focused on developing and marketing a distance-learning program for executive MBAs,” Mukherjee said. “The open-access feature of Beach World and Second Life in particular helped to build a strong collaborative community for students, which enhanced experiential and informal learning.”
The future of The Beach World may also solve space limitations the University is currently facing. The school currently has about 38,000 students.
According to the same press release, “In The Beach World, students will soon be able to virtually tour corporate facilities and operations such as Cisco or IBM. Many advertising agencies conduct tours of their offices, allowing students to watch professional campaigns take shape.”
MORE INFORMATION
http://www.csulb.edu/colleges/cba/secondlife/
