Open Wonderland: An Open Source Virtual Classroom

Open Wonderland is an open source Java-based toolkit for creating vibrant and collaborative 3D virtual worlds. The technology has wide ranging educational, business, and government applications because it is both extensible and robust. Open Wonderland allows audio communication, live desktop applications, and collaborative creation of graphical and procedural world content. One of the ways Open Wonderland is being used is to create virtual classrooms, where students that are geographically separated can come together to learn and collaborate.

Juliana Momodu, the COO of Virtual Worlds Education and a women’s education advocate, thinks that Open Wonderland might be just the tool to help Nigeria reach the Universal Basic Education component of their Millennium Development Goals by 2015. Not only will otherwise isolated children be able to enter a classroom, but the use of multimedia tools will help ensure that learning is interactive and engaging. Juliana hopes that Open Wonderland can help raise student enrollment and student retention rates.

In Nigeria, Virtual Technology For Education (VT4E) is working to implement, operate, and study Open Wonderland classrooms to better understand how they can best be used and applied globally. This program will benefit from the already extant collection of educators around the world who are creating their own Open Wonderland virtual classrooms and reaching out to students.