Second Life at NTU – Exploring the educational use of virtual worlds

Second Life at NTU – Exploring the educational use of virtual worlds

David Jukes, School of Animal, Rural and Environmental Sciences working with Sports Science

Background

A Nutrition Clinic set up within Second Life for 60 third year students. Students had to use their avatars to diagnose and research their SecondLife patients, all of whom had been created with different symptoms, ages, ethnicities, genders etc so students could take a case history, ask relevant questions and explore the diagnosis as they might do in real-life. Using note cards, students could ask questions of the clinic doctor, and have them answered by the tutor.

Established practice

Paper-based research exercise as part of Nutrition course.

Rationale

Wanted to explore the way in which SecondLife could be used for educational purposes and provide an integrated environment in which students could experience a ‘real’ set of scenarios but in a safe space. Resources could be fully integrated – they could talk to their patients in the SecondLife clinic as well as conduct web research within the library which had been created there too.

It had the potential to give students an holistic overview of a nutrition clinic, patients and researching conditions.

Changes to practice

• The environment needs to be planned and built by the educator prior to students entering. Developing content is highly time-intensive (the clinic took about 100 hours to build) and required building up trust-relationships with contacts in SecondLife who could act as content-developers. However, content can be repurposed so the initial time investment need not remain high for future presentations.
• Guidelines for use of environment needed because of the potential for students to leave the safety of the NTU SecondLife grid and explore other parts of the virtual world

Key points for effective practice

• Give students orientation activities which they must complete before engaging with the ‘real’ environment. It took students about 10 – 30 minutes to get used to the virtual world environment of SecondLife and this familiarity was ensured by creating a sandbox activity whereby students were required to interact with key SecondLife objects and which they had to complete to leave the area.
• They required little further instruction after this point as the environment proved quite intuitive. It was planned to mimic the real world in terms of affordances and usability
• Students do not need to know how to build objects to be able to use SecondLife as a learning environment
• Take advantage of reality to make the most of affordances which minimize the learning curve for students but use virtual ergonomics to maximise the environment’s potential
• The SecondLife environment provided a safe and controlled learning zone
• Allows an experience which went beyond the theoretical alone
• It is an immersive environment and offers the possibility for students to work with ‘real’ people
• Provides excellent support for visual and constructive learning

Conclusions and recommendations

Make sure that the use of SecondLife is done at what students consider to be the ‘correct’ level. At Level Three, students may be better off having real-life planning experiences rather than virtual world ones, whereas for students at Level One and Two, the opportunity to enrich their experiences via SecondLife and take them beyond a paper-based research exercise has real value.

Be careful about the use of branding and logos as there could be real-life consequences for misconduct in a virtual world.