Open University in Virtual Worlds: an update
Dr Shailey Minocha, from the Department of Computing at the Open University, provides an update on their activities for snapshot #8.
+ + + + +
Why we are using a virtual world?
Open University (OU) is a distance-education institution and on most of the courses, students don’t meet one another face-to-face. Our empirical research on the pedagogical role and effectiveness in the context of wikis and blogs in distance education has shown that inadequate socialisation at the start of the collaborative activity was a key obstacle in conducting group projects or activities at a distance.
Our objective of using 3D virtual worlds, such as Second Life, is that a 3D virtual environment provides a real-life-like setting or ‘place’ for socialisation, real-time collaboration and synchronous communication. We view Second Life (SL) as a part of a blended learning environment where students come into SL to attend meetings and tutorials and use other social software tools in conjunction with SL, such as a blog for reflection and note-taking, a wiki for recording the notes of the SL discussions and for collaborative authoring, or a forum for asynchronous discussions. On one of the courses, our students have conducted course-related activities in small groups in SL (such as visiting islands related to some aspects of the course followed by a panel discussion in SL), and then have continued to carry out discussions in the course forum.
We are investigating the role of SL to support team working on an undergraduate course that involves a group of students working on a project. Our research question is: does SL facilitate socialisation and team working and help in reduction of social distance amongst distance-learners? We have introduced wikis on this course to provide students with a collaborative authoring environment while they are working on the team-based project. Since the students are not co-located, we have suggested the use of SL to students for team-meetings.
A couple of my part-time PhD students don’t live in England, and are able to travel to the university’s campus for a face-to-face meeting only once or twice in a year. We regularly meet in SL for supervision-meetings.
Funded projects in Second Life
We have a number of funded teaching and research projects in SL since mid-2008.
Investigating 3-D Multi-User Virtual Environments for their Pedagogical Effectiveness, Teaching fellowship, funded by the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, OU
Related publication on the role of 3D virtual worlds in facilitating socialisation in remote teams (2008): in ALT-J: Research in Learning Technology
JISC-funded project on the Design of Learning Spaces in 3D multi-user virtual environments (DELVE)
Related publication related to the design and usability of learning spaces in Second Life
In the DELVE project, we have carried out research into two aspects of the design of 3D learning spaces: the degree of realism, and the degree of immersion. In the realism strand, the research has focussed on the design of learning spaces in SL, and was carried out at OU. The project team at University of Nottingham, UK focussed on the immersion strand and the research involved two kinds of virtual environments: semi-immersive virtual reality and SL.
Conducting empirical research in Second Life. The Faculty of Mathematics, Computing and Technology, OU, is supporting this project.
A real-world-like environment and a face-to-face-like setting in a 3D virtual world (VW) enable a perception of the interviews being conducted across a table with other avatar(s), or as if the researcher has ‘lived’ in a community, or as if the researcher has conducted participant-observations in the participants’ contexts. Thus an advantage for a researcher of conducting empirical studies in VWs, especially if the experience occurred in the VW, is that the participant will be situated in or near the context where the original event(s) took place. These situated contextual investigations have the ethos of the contextual inquiry method in social sciences research. In a 3D VW, the researcher can ‘visit’ the users in the users’ spaces and conduct observations and interviews.
The research process in a 3D VW is, therefore, influenced by codes of practice, etiquette, logistics, and ethical guidelines of conducting research in real-world (offline) and online.
Based on our experiences of conducting empirical research in SL, we are developing a toolkit for researchers who are aiming to conduct qualitative research studies in SL. This toolkit will provide guidance through case studies about: developing research materials, addressing the possible concerns of an institution’s Ethics Committee, how the data collection techniques need to be adapted for conducting research in 3D VWs, issues related to in-world recruitment of participants, logistics of conducting empirical research in 3D VWs such as voice versus text-based data collection, developing a researcher identity or a consistent persona, choosing the locations for conducting interviews or focus groups, and how to facilitate and manage the multiple channels of communication such as text (local chat and instant messaging), gestures and voice.
Evaluation of the experiences of using Second Life
We have evaluated experiences and perceptions of students and educators by applying a number of techniques in-world: observations, interviews, focus groups, tours, and via descriptive phenomenology.
These are some of the representative quotes from students about their experiences:
I get a feeling of meeting you [the tutor] face-to-face…even though I engage with avatars, I am aware that behind them there is a real person…
Sense of realism [in SL] which is hard to match in other online environments; feeling of space, context and environment persists and this makes a very real-experience
I particularly enjoyed meeting in the library as it was fitting to the topics under discussion
The students have expressed that SL enables them to get to know one another better and yet there is an element of privacy because of the avatar-based communication. They have also stated that they were able to take decisions related to their group project sooner than they would have been able to do if they were using discussion forums or other asynchronous technologies.
We would post things to the online forum and then discuss them and make any decisions / plan any actions at the meeting. This was partly because this method facilitated faster decision making, as ideas could be “thrashed out” in real time.
The students felt that the sense of presence in SL and being able to see one another gave them a sense of commitment towards one another in the team.
It is a lot more personal, particularly because you can see the person you are speaking to… and the avatars mean you get a picture in your head about what person is like…
I think it is better than video conferencing because people can be self conscious of what people think of their appearance …, whilst getting a graphical representation of people and a place helps engender familiarity and reassurance. Also the ability to see who is talking is excellent, particularly when you don’t know the people you are talking to.
Some students prefer video-conferencing to SL:
In video-conferencing, you can actually see the other participant’s faces and gauge reactions and emotions and avoid the nagging feeing that someone at the other end has wandered off (either physically or mentally)
However, students face a steep learning curve when they first come into SL. They experience difficulties with the voice and they find that the hardware requirements for SL are quite demanding in terms of graphics card, memory, and a broadband connection.
Too much to learn for a user who just wants to participate in meetings
Second Life does not provide the full set of functions required to hold an effective meeting: e.g. whiteboard, presenting a diagram
Plans for the near future
To facilitate distance-education in SL: Our evaluations have shown that, as intended, SL is facilitating team working, interactions with students and the educators, collaborative formal and informal learning, and community building. Therefore, we plan to continue with our investigations about the pedagogical effectiveness of SL. We would like to make the SL induction easier for both students and educators. Further, we would like to continue to develop guidance for educators about designing SL activities that match with the learning outcomes of the course and activities which exploit (or take advantages of) the ‘affordances’ of SL, and how to design or choose learning spaces in SL which match with the pedagogical strategies of the learning activities.
To investigate the efficacy of 3D virtual worlds in staff training and skills development: Thiagarajan (1996) states that role-plays are most useful for practising and developing interpersonal skills including conflict management, negotiation, influencing, active listening, giving and receiving feedback, and communication. Developing these ‘generic’ interpersonal skills are particularly useful for distributed work-environments. 3-D VWs such as SL enable creation of simulated settings for role-playing complex scenarios, which may not be possible or difficult to construct in real-life. Our aim is to design and conduct role-playing scenarios in SL to investigate the efficacy of SL in staff training and development of ‘generic’ inter-personal skills.
Resources
Album of Second Life events and learning spaces
Bookmarks related to Second Life and 3D virtual worlds
Posters related to research in 3D virtual worlds
Thiagarajan, S. 1996. Instructional games, simulations, and role-plays, in Craig, R.L. (Ed.), The ASTD Training and Development Handbook, 4th ed., McGraw-Hill, New York, NY.
