Abstract-Mass adoption of virtual world platforms for education and training implies efficient management of computational resources. In Second Life Grid and OpenSimulator, commonly used for this purpose, a key resource is the number of servers required to support educational spaces. Educational activities can take place at different altitudes over the same virtual land, for different classes. This way a single virtual world server can sustain several different educational spaces/classes, reducing the number of servers needed to make available different classrooms or other educational spaces. One issue whose importance is emphasized in such conditions is that of class privacy, bearing in mind that most privacy-management features of these platforms are land-based, not space-based. In this paper, we provide an overview of the issues to consider when planning privacy in these platforms and the methodologies that can be developed and implemented to ensure it at an adequate level, including the extra privacy possible in OpenSimulator regarding Second Life Grid.

The continuous need for education and the significant changes in European policies and regulations overseeing sports coaching and training require the adjustment of teaching models and methods to the needs and potential of teachers, students, and technology. In educational and training programmes for team sports coaching, it is common to use a group of athletes or video to demonstrate physical, technical, and tactical procedures. This requires significant human resources, both while developing the procedures and to reproduce them. Furthermore, both cases (live execution by athletes or video recording) are limited in visual perspective and detail. For this reason, specific software for demonstrating tactical procedures is sometimes used. But existing software presents significant limitations, for instance, when one cannot change procedures in real time nor can one interact with the audience. This article focus on the development of a new resource: a software system combining tri-dimensional automated avatars in the Second Life world, an external control server, and an helper desktop application. Using this system, coaches enrolled in education/training programs can more easily be involved, even taking a player’s role, and analyze movements from various points of view. This system aims to contribute to the improvement of the team handball coach education programs by supporting the understanding of the dynamics between defensive and offensive players in the organized phase of a handball game, using shared 3-D simulations with avatars.

Abstract-This work further clarifies how the MULTIS architecture can be used for integration of virtual worlds in Learning Management Systems (LMS) for organizational management of e-learning activities, as an extension to a previous work published in the proceedings of VEAI 2016. Current LMS provide minimal support for educational use in an organizational context, and other integration efforts assume educators are inside the virtual world, accessing the LMS as an external service. Our approach enables educators to setup and manage virtual world activities from within the traditional LMS Web interface as an integral part of the overall educational activities of a course. The MULTIS architecture foresees several alternative communication channels between LMS and virtual worlds, including the spooling of automated clients or "bots", and the flexibility to inject code if necessary and possible. In this work, we detail the application of this architecture and its approach in several sample scenarios, based on previous analysis of integration requirements. It is the result of a joint effort by academic and corporate teams, implemented and tested in the Formare LMS for OpenSimulator and Second Life Grid virtual world platforms.