The Ohio Learning Network (OLN) is exploring opening space in an OpenSim grid, comparable to what they have in Second Life®. As noted in the recent OLN Meetup notes, the “project is still in the discussion phase.” This is all part of the education world’s reaction to the new pricing in Second Life, but should have been an option all along for non-profits. It should open up a more vigorous attention to using virtual worlds for education. Like learning a new language always makes you more aware of the finer nuances of your native language, designing and creating and hosting our own virtual spaces will take us back to the core motives and values of education in a kind of pioneering sense.
Some advantages to hosting your own virtual space are a relaxing of building limitations, such as prim size, as well as creating your own privacy and age settings. for the best information on virtual worlds exploration, see jokaydia.com and the jokaydia virtual worlds wiki. She has lots of resources for OpenSim and ReactionGrid exploration.
Will Tri-C join the OpenSim adventure? We’ll see. What would you like to see us do? Would you like to see us explore something private or join an educational grid with some other institutions?
Wandering 
i can not stress enough the advantages of being self-hosted. if possible, being on your own servers would be ideal. installing OpenSim is not overly technical and certainly a competent IT professional could easily do so in an hour or so
if you don’t have such expertise, there are OpenSim developers that can be hired to do this on your own box. they are very reasonable and OpenSim runs so well that maintenance is not much of an issue
if you don’t have your own server, then a true dedicated server would be the next choice. this would be considered a “white label” host and is hard to beat. i looked into getting a dedicated server and hiring someone to install for me, but it was less expensive to use SimHost. i have a true dedicated server (not a shared box like the group mentioned above) and have absolutely 100% free reign
with hypergridding, you can be part of the community as well as 100% in control of access and your content
best of luck