University of East London in Second Life: update

Rose Heaney, at the University of East London, sent in her submission for snapshot number 8. And here it is:

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UEL School of Health & Bioscience

I wrote the last report at the end of an intense period of development during which we had worked with an external developer (Gemixin Ltd) on the school’s newly acquired island UEL HABitat to produce more sophisticated versions of an existing laboratory and Crime Scene house and, in particular, to create a new polyclinic for use by a range of healthcare students. We are now in a period of consolidation where the focus is on essential maintenance, creation of learning activities, orientation of staff and students and, most importantly, on more in depth evaluation than has been possible hitherto. We are also looking seriously at the possibilities for sharing our resources with the wider education community as well as collaborating with other institutions on new ventures.

The Second Life laboratory learning activities have been compared to an equivalent Flash version and the conclusion, not surprisingly perhaps, is that students can benefit from either type of application but have a preference for Flash because of its immediacy and straightforward operation. However more work needs to be done in this respect in that a Second Life laboratory may well have learning benefits beyond procedural learning once students are familiar with the operation of Second Life.

Herbal medicine students have been using their area of the polyclinic for a few months as an aid to developing clinical reasoning skills. Feedback is generally positive though some struggle with the environment and quite a few do not have home PCs with the correct graphics spec for SL. The physiotherapy area will be offered to students studying a respiratory module in late April / May once we have completed some necessary revisions to the web based back end editor that enables staff to add cases. It will be subject to formal evaluation during this time – the study has yet to be fully specified but will be focussing on confidence building in students prior to going on clinical placements in intensive care and high dependency units.

We are in early talks with another HE institution to develop the podiatry area of our polyclinic, so watch this space. We are also interested in collaborative arrangements to increase the number of patent cases in all areas of the polyclinic, the creation of good cases being a very resource intensive process.

For further information on UEL HABitat, including slurl, see blog entry:

http://blog.uelconnect.org.uk/hab/2009/11/27/current-state-of-play-on-second-life/

School of Psychology

The school now has conference and tutorial facilities in dedicated buildings on UEL’s main island. Some staff have recently started offering tutorials on a range of topics – take up has been variable but one member of staff managed to attract 23. Plans are in place for a conference later in the year at which third year students will present their final year research projects, subject to successful acceptance of abstracts by a conference committee. In other words, Second Life is being used to give them experience of academic conference processes prior to exposure to the real thing.

A pilot study of Psychology staff perceptions of SL as a teaching medium is currently underway. Participating staff take part in two semi-structured interviews pre and post their SL tutorial session. In the first interview staff are asked broad questions regarding their views of the advantages and disadvantages of using Second Life as a teaching environment and in the second about their actual experiences of teaching in Second Life. The interviews will be transcribed and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) employed to uncover themes within the data.