Survey response: Second Life at the University of York

A response in today from Kriss Fearon, Web Coordinator at the University of York. This is for the current ongoing snapshot survey. Kriss describes some issues that have been presented by many other respondants throughout the cycle of surveys.

Kriss will be at the CETIS/Eduserv workshop on virtual worlds in Glasgow on January 16th, if you want to chat to him.

What are you doing?

We have an island and are currently considering the best way of using the space to evaluate SL for teaching and learning purposes. Our island is at: http://slurl.com/secondlife/University%20of%20York/128/128/27

Are you doing any teaching or learning in virtual worlds?

Not yet, even though this was the purpose of buying space on there. It’s proved very difficult to get teaching staff engaged in the project, which is informal and voluntary and dependent on finding someone who’s interested and committed to think of good projects to do. We’re also coming up against technical challenges in delivering the SL viewer to students in our supported computer classrooms so we can get enough student access to do a viable study of how well it could work as a teaching/learning tool.

Do you think you’ll do more virtual world “stuff” in your institution in the next academic year? What will this be?

There are projects in the pipeline and I hope they come to fruition. We have another year or so of space on SL so there’s time to give it a decent try.

Tell me interesting “stuff” – anything you think is relevant.

Things I think might make the project work more effectively:

• A knowledgeable senior member of staff as a figurehead.
• Formal commitment to the project from the VLE team.
• Organised buy-out of staff time so there’s an opportunity to follow up on some of the really good ideas that have been suggested within a reasonable timescale.

We will learn some useful lessons from doing this, but as an institution may not be ready to make use of virtual worlds as a teaching tool – there isn’t the critical mass of interest here yet.