Officially Open

You may (or may not) have heard that last Wednesday was the official opening of the PSU World Campus island in the virtual world of Second Life. We’re using this space to give our online students their own ‘campus experience’ just like students on Penn State’s other campuses. If you ask undergraduate students the one thing they’ll always remember about Penn State, you’d have trouble finding a student on a physical campus that would mention anything at all about their courses, classwork, or ANGEL. They all mention things like The Diner, the creamery, and football games. The things they take with them from Penn State, are the social/outside the classroom things where they connect and meet other students. Using a virtual space like Second Life gives us a way to provide those sort of experiences for our students, too.

On Wednesday we spent a little over 12 hours meeting with students, colleagues and co-workers in Second Life. There were students from the US, Spain, and France, all ‘meeting’ each other for the first time.  Two of our students actually learned that they live very close to each other in Virginia and had no idea!  It was a wonderful time and really helped the students feel like a part of World Campus and a part of Penn State.  They said things like, “It is incredible the way a student can be involved with this university”, “I think it is an incredible environment ..I can interact with many people that live hundred of kilometers away from me”, and “I’ve been to several colleges over the years (including another major university in Ga Tech) and they always made me feel like just a number even when I was actually living on campus…Penn State feels more like a big extended family”.

The Penn State World Campus space in Second Life is a space for all of us – not just our students.  If we think about our co-workers in extension, located all over the state, or our telecommuters working outside the Outreach Building, or colleagues located all over campus, meeting in Second Life is an incredibly convenient, inexpensive way to connect with each other.  Having a community of Outreach employees, students, and even Penn State alumni having conversations and learning about each other starts to build a community of people that truly care about their experience and about Penn State.