Fast Prototyping of Learning Experiences: An Attempt of Modelling

There are already several examples of Enhanced Learning Management System (ELMS) that use 3D Virtual Worlds as a novel visual metaphor to catch the young student's attention, to convey concepts and to develop their competences in a learning-by-doing and collaborative fashion. However, their main weak point is the lack of flexibility in the design of the virtual environment and in the customization of the learning experience. Moreover, the number of users potentially involved in each learning session, the variety of learning strategies and the amount of learning objects already available, require the ability of fast prototyping each virtual learning experience, generating, sometimes hundreds, of customized sessions starting from the same "general format". The need to simplify the customization, open also to non-technical skilled people like teachers, have led us to focus the attention on the simplification of the authoring process of the learning experience and to develop OpenWebTalk, a general-purpose, flexible framework for the fast prototyping of collaborative 3D learning experiences that represents also a first approach to the structured modelling a learning session.