CourseExpo: An Immersive Collaborative Learning Ecosystem

Inspired by the need for remote learning technologies due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the isolated sense of lonely learners, we reimagined a remote classroom that fosters collaboration, builds community and yet without the constraints of the physical world. This paper presents a collaborative learning ecosystem that resembles a traditional city square where avatars of learners and facilitators wander, commingle, discover, and learn together. Buildings in the city square are learning modules which include typical knowledge units, assessment booths, or custom collaborative sketching studios. Our attempted prototype at realizing this conceptualization demonstrated initial success and we offer recommendations for future work.