Just a few years ago, virtual worlds were credited with the power to transform the universe. Used since the late 1990s in military and medical applications, virtual worlds first gained mainstream media attention when Linden Lab released Second Life in 2003. While other worlds, including open source environments, have launched since then (examples…

In a 2008 survey of students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 82 percent of undergraduate respondents said they preferred courses with online lecture content, and 60 percent said they would even be willing to pay for lecture capture services. Colleges and universities that have gone down the lecture capture path have found four essential…