creating 30 avatars for a university

Hello, I'm a SL designer for Washington State University. We are currently designing our first online class and have been asked by my employers to create about 30 avatars for students to use. I have found that Linden Labs only lets a number of different avatars to be create on the same computer. Does anyone know of a way to create the 30 avatars without to jump around to a bunch of computers to make them?

Also, these will not be bots but fuly functional for students to use on their laptops so please no answers regarding those. and please don't reply saying have the students create their own, it doesn't help cause my employers want control of that option for the class.

But any other responses would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

Easiest way would be to run around to different PCs to create them.

It doesn't take too long to fire up a new account - probably have that done before you get some other answer and you won't have to worry about sidestepping LL rules, which can lead to trouble.

True, I was hoping to avoid that since their are only 5 here. But you maybe right

Drop pathfinder Linden a notecard. He's the education specialist.

This is a Linden Labs limit that they put on to keep people from creating a zillion alts. Anything anyone in these forums might suggest as a workaround for that would be against LL policy and would risk getting your university network banned from SL. I'm thinking that's not what you are going for.

LL loves loves loves when Universities make use of SL - and love to bend over backwards because in the eyes of the public, what you university people do here is cutting edge and interesting while the stuff we here in the public sector do is capitalistic and evil. lol

Seriously though - talk to Linden Labs about this. Describe you project, tell them what you need to do and they'll work something out with the university to make it so it works somehow. Don't try to do an end-run around the PTBs - they frown on that. And that'll just get your own PTB's mad at you for getting them banned from SL.

Is the avatar limit imposed per computer or per email address? Can a bunch of hotmail accounts accomplish this, hosting 5-6 avs each?

If it were me, I'd email LL and ask them how this can be accomplished, considering you are an educational institution and LL tends to make a big play of educational uses for SL.

Just a thought.

I've seen the complaint about not being able to create accounts on mailing lists before, if you contact Linden Lab they will accomodate you, they just like to know what's happening and they'll white list your ip addresses and such like.

Yes, it's by email address, not physical machine. Call LL before anything. They may just set them up for you just to kiss your university behind.

I'd let the students make their own avatars.

Even if they try and do that it will often block them after five or so accounts when they go through it in a classroom situation.

I don't know of any limitation of number of avatars created per computer. Per real life identity (as provided by you), yes. Per email address, yes. But many people share computers, and it would be silly of LL to limit that.

Are you in touch at all with other educators? They might be the best people to contact about this and other issues you will need to address. They have a mailing list on which you could ask a question like this one, for example, SLED.

And, Linden Lab does a lot to help schools get themselves established in SL. Take a look at:
http://www.secondlifegrid.net/slfe/education-use-virtual-world

and the teaching wiki:

http://www.simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=Second_Life_Education_Wiki

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They do limit by ip address, I'd imagine many of the university computers would share an external ip address.

Search the SLED archives - legitimate educational institutions can have IPs whitelisted to cover exactly this sort of thing.

DG

The enforced limits are:

5 per email address
5 per IP address
2 per day

I have a friend that would know quite a bit about what you are asking; she's a bit of an expert with regards to this stuff and universities, and knows exactly what you have to do to certify the avatars &c &c in terms of not getting locked out by the normal rules. It's a bit of extra paperwork, as I understand it, and it has to be constantly updated. Contact Aevalle Galicia with an IM inworld and say Des sent you.

One thing about the avatars though; if anyone did something improper with them, guess who would be held responsible.

Wouldn't this be a TOS breach as in the op will be creating av's and then presumably giving the account info (name/password) to the students?

Technically, yes. This is why I gave him the URL for Secondlifegrid.net - corporations and schools have to do that all the time, and LL can facilitate this for legitimate purposes.
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nevermind. redundant.

Be sure to join the SL Educators mailing list
https://lists.secondlife.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/educators