‘Beach World’ Gives Students Virtual Access

Flying like superheroes over California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), marketing professors David Horne and Ingrid Martin loop around the Walter Pyramid on their way toward an outdoor classroom where they land and take a seat next to a transformer robot, then wait for class to begin.

Horne and Martin are avatars, virtual characters they created to demonstrate The Beach World, a new digital CSULB campus developed within the realm of Second Life, a free online world imagined and created by its members.

Beach World was designed by faculty and students within CSULB’s College of Business Administration (CBA) to broaden the classroom setting, to augment the traditional in-classroom instruction and as a means to enable online distance education. It also provides faculty the ability to create and conduct research within a number of marketplace and learning environments.

The Beach World has three classrooms that seat up to 40 student avatars and up to 10 guests, as well as a large 150- seat lecture hall.

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