Join

The partnership organizations comprising The Center for Learning In Virtual Environment recognizes that quality education and the professional development of faculty must be immersed within the discipline and institutional culture and be governed by the faculty themselves. With these principles as a foundation, CLIVE is collaboratively developing online and 3D Virtual Worlds resources and web-based services to enable faculty and students to be successful in their teaching and learning. MERLOT (www.merlot.org) was created in 1997 by the Californial State University system to help faculty and students share high quality online content and pedagogy. Under the CSU's leadership, MERLOT has grown to an international consortium of education institutions, professional societies, digital libraries, and corporations (see taste.merlot.org for more information).

Building Locally, Linking Globally, Meeting Virtually

CLIVE is building on the efforts of local campus leaders within disciplines to develop communities of faculty who will discover, review, organize and disseminate exemplary practices for teaching and learning with technology in 3D Virtual spaces. For example, San Francisco State University received a federal grant for infusing international business within college's curriculum and throughout the CSU. The challenges faculty face in implementing 3D Virtual Learning Materials are:

How do I create curriculum that will improve student learning and is recognized by my colleagues as “scholarship of teaching”?
How do I not recreate high quality curriculum that has already been developed and used?

CLIVE is a site governed by The Center for Advanced Technology in Education (CATE) at teh University of Oregon that leverages the larger efforts of faculty developing capacity in 3D Virtual Worlds and MERLOT communities. This illustration shows how the faculty create and work within their local online community, resources, and collection but their work gets channeled as they see fit, into the larger CLIVE community and the even larger multidisciplinary MERLOT Community. The opportunity to participate in the communities that best serve their individual needs is what the current design will enable faculty to do.

top of page

Enter CLIVE's MERLOT 3D

The CLIVE Teaching Faculty Council has been established to support the professional development of 3D Virtual Worlds teaching faculty in their efforts to provide excellent academic programs for their students. The website is one means to provide these professional development services.

Complimenting the web-based CLIVE Teaching Commons is CLIVE's MERLOT 3D, a virtual world being designed for faculty to literally immerse themselves in the task of comparing and contrasting the relative capacities of 3D Virtual Worlds. Using Sun Microsystem's Wonderland, an open source 3D Virtual World, CLIVE is rendering a rich, multimedia space appropriate to the media of our trade.