The Good Life
Leslie Jarmon receives major UT System grant to support innovative teaching initiative based on Second Life.
Associate Dean Rob Bruce announced June 23 that the UT System has awarded DIIA’s Leslie Jarmon a $250,000 grant under its Transforming Undergraduate Education (TUE) program. The purpose of program grants is to “stimulate creative approaches to instruction” with the complementary goals of increasing “student access and success” and of managing or reducing instructional costs. Grants have been awarded in the areas of pedagogy, learning materials, instructional technologies, and learning spaces. Winning projects were required to be innovative, offer adaptability throughout the UT system, be based on sound educational and evaluative principles, and foster inter- and intra-campus collaboration.
The TUE initiative is funded by allocations from the Intermediate Term Fund (ITF) and from the Available University Fund (AUF). The monies are dedicated to supporting innovative proposals that include methodologies for evaluating program effectiveness, as determined by measures of student success.
Jarmon’s proposal, Building Immersive Instructional Experiences and Learning Communities in Second Life, offers a creative approach to undergraduate instruction using Second Life, the free, online virtual-world technology that converges Web 2.0 social networking capabilities with Web 3.0 three-dimensional environments. The goal of the project is to use the virtual world environment to cultivate working communities of learning and discovery transcending the complex, interdisciplinary UT System, empowering students to become innovators and thought leaders throughout Texas, the U.S., and the world.
The initiative is designed to foster extensive collaboration within and among the UT System’s 16 campuses, by means of an open, online virtual platform that can be networked, customized, adapted, and expanded. The instructional paradigm is grounded in foundational principles for active and engaged learning, as reflected in research concerning virtual-learning spaces.
Jarmon, now a faculty development specialist at DIIA, was an early-adopter of instructional uses of virtual worlds, becoming a role model and advocate for colleagues looking to refresh pedagogy with innovative uses of emerging technology. In 2007, partnering with DIIA’s research team, she created a graduate course in which her students formed an interdisciplinary team to collaborate with students from the BaSiC Initiative of the School of Architecture. Together they created a virtual presence in Second Life for two green, sustainable, urban housing designs called The Alley Flats. The project culminated with a virtual ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by participants and guests, followed by a walk-through of the two Alley Flats virtual homes.
The BaSiC Initiative supports community partnerships to create housing solutions and community services. In the past two decades, the program has designed and built more than 50 projects, including schools, clinics, libraries, urban gardens, and infrastructure facilities. The collaboration by means of Second Life allowed Jarmon’s students to reach beyond the physical walls of a classroom for an immersive experience that extended their knowledge, skills, and thinking.
Jarmon has since become a leader in UT Austin’s venture into reinventing teaching by integrating virtual world environments into instructional design. In announcing the award of TUE funding, Chancellor Francisco Cigarroa congratulated Jarmon for her innovative spirit, citing the TUE grant as “recognition of your program’s promise to foster creative approaches to cost-effective instruction techniques to increase student access and success.”