Rose Heaney’s contribution to snapshot #10

Although it doesn’t quite fit the format for snapshot #10, we’re including the contribution from Rose Heaney of the University of East London, as it’s relevant and rather good. So here’s what they’ve been doing there.

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UEL has had a presence on Second Life since 2008 in the form of UEL Island, and more recently UEL HABitat owned by the school of Health, Sport and Bioscience. Second Life has not been widely adopted across the university, but some staff and students in healthcare and psychology have been using it quite extensively.

Health simulations

The main focus of interest on UEL HABitat is the virtual polyclinic, which continues to be used by herbal medicine and physiotherapy students, and is soon to be used by podiatry students from UEL and Plymouth University under a collaborative arrangement. Each discipline has its own area where students interact via their avatars with virtual patients and surrounding objects to practice procedures and develop their clinical reasoning skills.


Staff and student evaluations of the simulations indicate a general level of satisfaction and highlight the advantage of Second Life over paper based or role-play exercises in the classroom. However, there are ongoing challenges, not least the fact that a significant minority of students still struggle to master Second Life and the skills required by staff to operate and configure the environment beyond the core development phase. Reliance on Second Life development expertise is a further consideration in the current climate.

Psychology conferencing and tutorials

Second year Psychology students on an elective module “Psychology of physical illness’ upload posters to a designated area in their school’s conference suite on UEL island and spend a morning discussing them with staff and students from their module and beyond. Using Second Life in this way extends the reach that a physical poster display would typically have. It also removes inhibitions that students might otherwise have in face to face conversations. A few psychology staff also use Second Life for tutorials and one recently reported that students repeatedly rate Second Life higher than most other aspects of his module delivery.

Integration

UEL is in the process of changing from Blackboard to Moodle VLE, so we will be taking a closer look at SLOODLE, the main interest from academics at this stage being in linking Moodle and Second Life for assessment purposes.

Future

To date it has been relatively straightforward to cover our Second Life costs but in anticipation of a much tighter funding regime, we continue to look at OpenSim as an alternative. However, due to network configuration conflicts, we are as yet unable to carry out a thorough investigation of OpenSim, and therefore hope to retain at least one island on SL until mid 2013.

In resolving the OpenSim issues we may be able to draw on the experience of the Europe-wide Pandora project ‘Advanced Training Environment for Crisis Scenarios’ which counts UEL amongst its partners and is using OpenSim.