As text-based predecessors to Second Life, MOOs can offer educators important insights on managing virtual communities to create rich, meaningful learning experiences. Rochelle Mazar and Jason Nolan outline two instructional experiments in MOOs that have implications for current educational practice in Second Life. One involves modifying and modulating users' ability to speak, first by strategically removing this ability altogether in an attempt to manage information flow and then by adding context-based text to a student's speech to strengthen the immersiveness of the experience. The second experiment explores the use of chatterbots to deepen the richness and interactivity of a virtual build. While MOOs and Second Life appear to be vastly different technologies, Mazar and Nolan highlight their similarities and suggest that educators can apply the lessons learned from MOO experience to Second Life practice.

Using video games, virtual simulations, and other digital spaces for learning can be a time-consuming process; aside from technical issues that may absorb class time, students take longer to achieve gains in learning in virtual environments. Greg Jones and Scott Warren describe how intelligent agents, in-game characters that respond to the context of the game and to the individual player's situation, can accelerate learning in MUVEs and other virtual learning environments. These agents can be designed to deliver instructional content, to provide cognitive aids for students wrestling with complex concepts, and to react and adapt to learner behavior. After describing the role that intelligent agents can play within the narrative framework of a game, Jones and Warren describe one example that combines intelligent agents with a structuring narrative as a means of reducing the amount of time it takes for learning in virtual environments to produce improved learning outcomes.