Does virtual learning have to be dreadful?

by Tateru Nino Jan 9th 2009 at 10:00AM

Filed under: Opinion, Second Life, Academic, Education, Virtual worlds

Australia's School of the Air programs have been among the most lauded distance education schemes for more than 50 years. In response to a scattered population in a less than hospitable environment and with a lack of nearby population centers and facilities, the School of the Air provided education for isolated children. The original School of the Air was opened in 1951, but had been broadcasting school lessons from the Royal Flying Doctor Service for some years prior to that. The School of the Air programs still operate today, as there are students living more than 800 kilometres (more than 500 miles) away from the nearest school.

Originally the system used pedal-powered radios, but more recently bi-directional broadband satellite communications, video conferencing and electronic whiteboards have brought students closer. The system has been an unqualified success for more than half a century.

Why is it then, that as soon as the notion of avatars and collaborative virtual environments is brought up for education, that the educational establishments seem to shy away? Does virtual learning have to be dreadful before anyone is willing to seriously fund it?

From the School of the Air perspective, learning in virtual environments (such as Linden Lab's Second Life) is a logical extension. Such an environment brings students closer together, and allows them to more easily collaborate on classwork and coursework, but otherwise is not so different notionally to what students experience already.

The students might even enjoy it under the right circumstances.

And there's the rub, really. Games try, within modern technical limitations, to look like the real world, and virtual environments do too. To the casual observer, therefore, virtual environments look like games, and it seems rather alien to many that our children and students should have access to learning tools that might also have enjoyable aspects that are not a part of a rigid curriculum. Or indeed, enjoyable aspects at all.

Sure, educational bodies and committees talk about enjoyable learning experiences and that students should, if possible, enjoy learning. Yet when it comes to allocating budgets, anything that seems in the least bit game-like seems to wind up at the bottom of the list, as if enjoyment was the antithesis of learning.

Despite all this, and despite the projects being near the bottom of the funding totem-pole, universities and colleges are still managing to establish presences in collaborative virtual environments, and investigate their usefulness for education. Some few even manage effective distance education, much like Australia's School of the Air. Ultimately, it is something we expect to see a lot more of, though we also expect to see it opposed and questioned at every turn before finally struggling into the mainstream at some uncertain point in the future.

Have our views on the beneficial uses of technology and its social implications stagnated so much over the last half century?

Tags: academic, australia, education, opinion, royal-flying-doctor-service, school-of-the-air, second-life, virtual-worlds

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Eloise said on 10:50AM 1-09-2009

Beg you pardon? If educational establishments shy away, why are over 90% of UK HE establishments represented in Second Life, many of them with several islands. Have you looked at the size of the NMC continent - whilst part of that is run and funded purely by NMC, there are a lot of islands there run through NMC for specific (mainly US) educational establishments. There are at least two additional groups of rental chains of island (EduNation and EduIsland) that cater exclusively to educators. There are over 5000 members of the SL Educators mailing list and it's one of the most active you'll find.

Of course you might try to claim all of the content is awful, but by what criteria? Many people are getting good to excellent reviews from students, expanding their teaching in Second Life and doing very nicely thank you. Awful - not by any meaningful criteria to educators.

Tateru Nino said on 11:00AM 1-09-2009

As I noted, there are many of them in SL, and doing well - but likewise most of those projects are scraping the bottom of the budget barrels.

Imagine what they could do with the sort of funds that are allocated even to very minor curriculum development projects.

Jiz Source said on 11:28AM 1-09-2009

Hi Tateru! This is my kind of discussion. Firstly I’ll answer your question, no our views haven’t :) wow that was easy!

This is my perception of the uptake of virtual world technologies, from a UK perspective. It’s pretty steady, however schools have so many obstacles to overcome (I won’t dare name them all but here are a few to get you thinking).

School internet services are heavily filtered and blocked. Teachers have to gain access to sites such as Youtube, facebook etc and when it comes to Virtual Worlds it gets even more problematic. Usually teachers need to jump through so many hoops; it gets rather time consuming and frustrating.
Cost: it’s expensive; schools don’t have the money to invest in comparison to universities.

Solid research: there are many people in education who still need convincing with regards to the successful use of virtual world technologies in education. This is starting to filter down and much credible research is being undergone at a university level. But it’s still rather early (education evolves a lot slower than technology)

Time, confidence and understanding: all of which are intertwined, teachers as a whole already have a large workload and it takes a lot of patients, time and understanding to be confident enough to run a class in a virtual world. I tip my hat at the ones who are doing it!

Companies like Linden Labs and traditional games companies (such as Nintendo, Sony Computer Entertainment, Blitz Games and even broadcasters (such as the BBC and Channel 4)), all consider gaming technologies / virtual worlds as a fantastic educational tool and take the matter very seriously. It’s simply a time issue and the current economic situation hasn’t helped!

You will see alot more gaming technologies / virtual worlds being used in education in the years to come, just stay tuned!

I better say this...

These are my own personal views and thoughts and in no way represent the views of my employer... blah blah blah :)

All the best Jiz

Dedric Mauriac said on 12:56PM 1-09-2009

I find it silly that the most popular online schools are not in virtual worlds already. Still, i find it amazing that many schools today offer courses online. I believe the problem may be a lack of control/security, and the "wait and see" approach in waiting for the technology to mature.

Ciaran Laval said on 1:17PM 1-09-2009

I would oppose rather vociferously any attempts to prise my education budget to be spent with Linden Lab after the openspace issue, I will not recommend spending taxpayers money with a company who work in that fashion and as I'm a budget holder I don't want my budget and future budgets screwed up by such shoddy mismanagement.

As for virtual worlds in education as a whole, there's a long way to go. We've looked at Second Life, we had those who claimed it was a game, others were far more enthusiastic having seen how other educational institutions used Second Life. However the issues over bandwidth, security and what exactly can be delivered in this environment that can't be achieved with other virtual learning environments were primary concerns and as it stands Second Life and other virtual worlds don't quite grip the imagination in the way they could. Developments such as sloodle do have potential and I'd imagine the Rivers Run Red immersive workspaces will also be appealing but there's still that stigma that it's a game and the simple fact that something as basic as writing on an interactive whiteboard inworld isn't straightforward, presenting powerpoint presentations isn't straight forward.

However it's getting there, the potential is still massive.

Stella Costello said on 1:50PM 1-09-2009

Hi Tateru! Thanks for calling attention to this!

I've been developing projects in Second Life for 3+ years now and for the last two I have focused on virtual worlds for education with NMC Virtual Worlds. Of the hundreds of projects I have witnessed or taken part in, none are more artistically rewarding or community focused than those undertaken by faculty from around the world. Educators are by their very nature innovators and over the past year especially, I have witnessed all of the innovation, collaboration, connectivity, and forward thinking that virtual worlds were supposed to have promised us long ago through the dedication and passion of educators.
As Jiz said, universities and schools can suffer from filtered and blocked Internet. Likewise, adequate computers and bandwidth can present issues, as can security and control as Dedric pointed out. All this aside, an enormous amount of universities and schools are doing projects far more impressive than I imagined when I got into this field. In just the past two months I have seen virtual worlds projects used to help students explore bioethics debates on end of life scenarios, prenatal care training for medical students, write research papers from concept to completion, scenario training for dental students, and preform environment relationship research.
Those that are here now are not only changing the face of education but also innovating virtual worlds use as a whole.

Dave D said on 5:04PM 1-09-2009

There's not much point to it though. It's just putting window dressing up, and relatively expensive window dressing at that. You could get the same if better results just by using IRC chat to make a virtual classroom simply because you don't need to spend linden dollars and suffer potential disruption from passerby.

The radio of the air worked because it brought education to people unable to be served by it. All second life education does is put a fancy graphical front-end to programs that could already use the net. There's no real benefit to it, any more than companies see any real benefit to having second life presences-it's just the trendy thing to do.

J Ross Nicoll said on 1:23PM 1-10-2009

Lets start with teen grid. This is like my arch-nemesis. We're a university, so most of our students are 18 and over, so a main grid island make sense. However, that means we can't use it to advertise what we're doing (and advertising to potential students would be an easy sell for the budget). Oh, and we have some 16/17 students, who can't get into main grid.

So we could get a teen grid island, except then ALL adults have to be background checked by Linden Labs. Then someone says "Hey, I'm doing this project with some 12 year olds from the local school", and that's the rest of your plan in tatters.

Cost has to be the next big issue. Buying and maintaining an island is a tricky sell, but not impossible. How do you then explain hiring someone to develop content for a course, which can easily eclipse the cost of the island. If you're lucky you can get a PhD student to do the work, otherwise it's highly unlikely to make sense unless you can re-sell the content. Some people just try giving lectures in SL, sometimes even by putting the students in lab of university computers; suffice to say I'm not convinced that helps.

Oh, and once you have content, you want to control it, but LL have it. No backups, entirely dependent on their grid.

Personally, yesterday I put the finishing touches to a funding proposal to help get UK institutions into OpenSim. Content and interconnectivity are issues, but if we can get enough institutions to agree to share content they've made, and use hypergrid to connect installations, I can see this really help move things forward.

Pavig Lok said on 10:49PM 1-11-2009

Unfortunately there are a few barriers to adoption for virtual worlds technology in education. From talking to folk thinking of adopting (and i'm lumping in museum and library folk here too as they seem to have the same complaints), the argument goes like this:

In terms of the fluidity of interaction, rapid content development, exposure they need, Second Life is the only game in town. (Other competing systems fall down on one or more of those fronts.)

Yet, SL falls down on web integration, behind the firewall support, and is bandwidth hungry to run a lot of clients simultaneously.

More importantly though the fact that kids can't get into the adult grid and adults can't get into the kids grid immediately disqualifies a linden solution. Schools want to control who gets into their classrooms by their own rules, not by an arbitrary age limit. Libraries, museums, cultural bodies of other types, want to ensure all people can get in, children included.

(It should be noted that this linden main-grid/teen-grid divide sits right on the age of senior high and early college students, disqualifying the education audience most likely to make use of VW tech. The lindens can host seperate sub-grids where you can set your own rules, but don't inform us very well of our options.)

From what I gather it's certainly difficult to budget for virtual worlds stuff, and you get what you pay for. Unfortunately due to the many shortcomings of current systems (and linden policies on that front) it is difficult to justify in terms of bang for buck.

I think this will come when systems like opencroquet start to develop the ease of use of SL, or when SL or other more accessible virtual worlds get some of the more high end tools that croquet has. After all, think of the possible educational uses of high-tech user interface elements missing from SL such as.... a box you can type in. :P

Mr. Bill said on 5:06PM 1-14-2009

I think it is important to first recognize that learning is a social event. There are plenty of educational theorists and studies that support this assumption, so I won't dwell on the statement. And, people like to feel 'accepted' and part of a community. There are many who also support learning through role-play. Distance learning frequently lacks adequate design and fails to address the need to facilitate social interaction, collaboration, and developing sense of community. SL, when it works, has the potential to do all of the above quite well. It even provides the option to communicate with keyboard or real-time audio (voice). In my opinion, the main things holding SL back are:

1) well thought out plans of how to use the environment to the maximum benefit of student and educator
2) cost
3) bandwidth
4) and computers

As an administrator of DL technologies, I always struggle with the dilemma of whether to use 'cutting edge' technologies or not. Frequently, more recent technologies require access to high bandwidth and a computer with a fairly beefy CPU and graphics card. Adopting such a technology and requiring that students have a current model, semi-powerful computer and frequent access to a high-speed connection drives a wider wedge between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots.' But, I believe there is certainly value for the making the technology available if sufficient students have the ability to take advantage of the benefits. By employing new technologies, it allows us to explore our options for new best practices and advance related fields simultaneously. But we must go in with a sound instructional systems design plan and adequate technical support for student and educator alike.

To merely use SL for its novelty sake is no better than trying to transfer a lecture course to DL and teach it as a lecture class.