SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Students may not be familiar with San Jose State
University's school of library and information science because there is
no physical building.

There is, however, a virtual one.

Anthony Bernier, an assistant professor for the school, said students
don't need to commute or move to receive the benefits of the program
because all courses, lectures and seminars are available online through
course management systems, where students can log in to watch
videotaped lectures.

"We have students who are all over the country-in fact, all over the
world," he said.

This school, which is primarily online, gives graduate students an
American Librarian Association accredited degree in librarianship upon
graduation.

Dale David, an instructional technology assistant for the library
program, said the school is about 95 percent online, and is represented
in at least 10 states and six to 10 countries. He said a lot of their
students aren't based in San Jose, which is why they started working
with online education in 2000.

"It's an online system, so it allows us to experiment and we kind of do
everything in-house," he said. "We don't rely on a lot of the
university-level services, so it's pretty much a home-grown and
home-maintained program."

Jeremy Kemp, a lecturer of the school, said it has had students
involved in distance education for about a decade and has multiple
online resources to accommodate different students' learning
preferences.

"We use all these different tools, and they all get mixed into the pot
of distance education tools," he said. "Each one of these tools has
different methods and a different set of people it serves."

Bernier said the school looks for new ways to technically reach
students, which is why two years ago they used a $30,000 grant from the
George Soros Foundation to create its own college on an island in
Second Life. Second Life is a 3-D, virtual world used as a social
network by its users.

"Most of us never see our students physically, face to face, except
maybe at graduation. But otherwise, Second Life is an example of an
immersive environment," he said.

Bernier said Second Life offers students the personal interaction
absent in online courses because they can virtually attend seminars
when the professors are actually giving them. Students create their own
avatars, or virtual students, which attend classes and school functions
in Second Life.

"We were the first library school in the country to have our own island
on Second Life," Bernier said. "We had a Halloween party that drew 250
people."

Bernier said Second Life is increasingly being used as a form of
instruction.

"I would appear on Second Life on a particular time and day and my
students would show up on that day and I would deliver a lecture in
Second Life, or we would do a group exercise or several," he said.