In the first article in this series we discussed the high level considerations for making learners comfortable and productive during a virtual world learning experience. Now, we explore some specific examples of what can go wrong and prevent your learners from focusing on their objectives.
By far, the largest source of issues for the 300+ learners in my study was the SL platform itself. Participants reported, 114 times, that what they hated most was that the SL platform would freeze or crash, their computers were frozen and had to be rebooted, and that they had to wait for slow updates before they could use the program. The next largest group of issues were personal or individual. These included distraction, confusion, disorientation and generally feeling annoyed by SL.
Learners also reported that there were two steep learning curves to overcome before they could learn. One was how to use SL in general, the other was how to master specific tasks that were key to their academic use of SL. Less often reported were interpersonal issues including crowding at the class academic site in SL which created waiting times for use of the accounting equation model. A surprising interpersonal issue was that many learners reported annoyance at feeling obligated to respond to chats from other avatars. One of the features that proponents of 3D immersive environments advocate is its ability to be used for interaction between learners. But, what about learners who don’t want to interact? For them, this feature is a liability.
While this was the least often reported by learners, it is interesting that 18 unique learners reported that they doubted that SL (or other 3D platforms) had any potential for learning value at all. One learner summed it up like this: “I find Second Life a difficult tool to use for accounting work. It’s just too confusing and slow on top of an already difficult class to grasp and learn.” While my empirical research has shown that 3D platforms can be effective learning environments (when the experience is well-crafted), this learner disbelief or discouragement may be an issue for learning professionals to overcome as part of instituting a 3D immersive learning experience.
You may have heard many of these complaints about 3D platforms from people who believe they simply can’t be used effectively for learning. But, to make an informed decision about whether 3D learning experiences are for you, you also need to hear is what learners love about the experience – which is coming in the next article.
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…what I find most frustrating is student posts that just regurgitate the reading with a few quotes and thats it. I don’t want to read that! I want to see some thought put into their posts with ideas, reflections and opinions, positive or negative.
I teach blended and virtual classes at Miami Dade College, and my students post are more thoughtful than my fellow grad. student posts at Capella in my PhD program
David, perhaps quality of posts depends on complex factors? Although I share your frustration with posts as you describe them, and won’t respond to them, I have found the instructor to be key in creating quality interactions. The leadership capstone course in IDOL (yes, I am a fellow Capella doctoral learner) was simply exhilarating, challenging status quo and stale ideas. During the rigorous discussions my dissertation topic emerged, my self-efficacy was boost, and new relationships were forged. Sadly, it was an exception.
Research into this phenomenon may reveal valuable suggestions for both design and facilitation of these crucial learning connections. Perhaps, your own desires will convert to improved course designs. I have often found a negative experience inspires action!
I think the “18 unique learners” make a good point. As with any learning strategy, the technology has to compliment the competencies being taught. If this is not done properly, then you run the risk of alienating your learners, therefore defeating the purpose. I’m not sure that an accounting exercise would be the best fit for a virtual learning experience.
One of the primary goals of virtual learning is to allow the learners to “fail safely”….I can think of any number of ways that could be achieved in accounting.
In looking over this article and posts, it is an interesting phenomenon that the students are struggling with tool with which they are to interact and learn. Sometimes, simple might be better. Accounting is about numbers, so from my outside perspective, it seems to me using a virtual second life graphic environment, may not be optimal for the type of learning required for this subject. Just my thoughts on this. Giving practical case study with application of the accounting principles or concepts may be optimal. Just my thoughts. I could be way off base.
My background includes over 20 years of instructional design working with technical to service to sales audiences. I typically customize the approach based on the needs of the audience and the content.
Not all of the person learn in the stander way. Some by hearing or by menory ,But the visual way where the person has to see and experiment is very different learing.The mind has different way to get in concept .And there are many way to get these concept for the person to understand . There has to be a better way to development for different kind of mind .
I have great sympathy for the learners in this study. Second Life requires first-class computing hardware and network connectivity to perform adequately (plus inworld built environments optimized for performance); the client UI and associated praxis for inworld interaction are undeniably complex; and social norms (such as ‘whispering in class’ by means of IM, or text-chatting ‘on open’ while an instructor is speaking in the voice channel) are hard to sort out, and may easily be perceived as distracting or even abusive by newcomers (and these features may indeed _be_ abused by the minority of people, predictably a part of almost every crowd, who seem to lack a critical gene for social empathy in projective shared spaces).
As a general rule, virtual worlds do not work for people whose initial encounters with them are marred by performance issues, unless the motivation to be there is exceptionally strong and emerges from the self (i.e., is linked to deep curiosity about the nature of virtual experience or virtual world technology); unless there is a relatively long period of ‘ungraded’ and at least partially self-guided practice and exploration resulting in a degree of mastery of the UI and ‘native’ social standards, and investment in the avatar persona; and unless there is the gratification of early discovery that virtual worlds (for you, the learner) solve a real problem.
What real problem did this study solve for learners? Were great geographic or temporal barriers overcome by holding accounting class in SL? Did learners have the unique experience of working and interacting with some leader in the field? Was there, in short, anything motivating these students to become immersed and spontaneously discover and exploit the unique affordances of the platform (for example, by engaging a luminous intellect – normally remote – in direct dialogue)? Or was this experiment, in a sense, a perfect setup to produce the (completely logical) conclusion that non-immersed students, on poor hardware, in a primmy sim, taking a routine accounting class, might shrug and vote a preference for trying a less-painful web solution, or just meeting in a nice warm classroom with a blackboard, like normal?
The problem with using Virtual Classroom is, as with any new factor, the human element. Over the years working as a field engineer and developer of programs for educational institutes I have found that participants are divided into two groups. The first one being ones that embrace technology and they have very little patience with problem when trying out something new and are hard to please but come around in a short time. The second group is one that does not understand the technology and will look for any way possible to defer their inabilities to the technology verses themselves. Unlike the first group the second one will be hard to win over for any little problems just confirms in their mind what they suspected in the first place.
Let’s not confuse “virtual worlds” from “virtual classrooms”, these are two very different technologies and only share the fact that they are done virtually and there is some collaboration going on in both of them. However I know for a fact that virtual classes do work and they work very well. In fact people are so comfortable with virtual meetings that attending a virtual class is not a difficult transition for them to make. Now virtual worlds on the other hand provide a very different experience. Several years ago my internal team decided to conduct our global offsite via SL (Second Life) since we couldn’t travel at the time. Several of my team members did experience glitches and performance issues with SL. At first we had to find each other and get people up to speed on the basics and once we started talking there really wasn’t much to look at or do in SL versus what we could do with a virtual meeting environment. SL is really suited as a social environment for people to meet and greet one another and create your own virtual environment with 3D objects sort of like a playhouse of sorts. There are people who are really into those things but I suspect these might be the same type of personality that is into Worlds of Warcraft and Final Fantasy types of environments.
I tried to show the SL environment to my fiancee and she wasn’t very impressed after we came across two avatars that were well…not something you want your children watching. After that SL lost its appeal and some credibility.
Virtual environments could catch on if the experience was more life like, in the sense that you could view a more high fidelity experience via head displays and feel like you are really there as opposed to a low quality animation.
I’m reading a comment about SL as opportunity to have a “safe place to fail” and also a risk at encountering overtly & graphically sexual experiences. I had not been on SL for about a year and was really bummed to see how it has been overtaken by swingers. If SL and other virtual worlds are going to be an option for education and training (with the associated likelihood of children & people are offended by sex outside the bedroom), then there needs to be some censorship. I don’t mean censorship of ideas, opinions, or access. I mean clear boundaries placed on where these activities will be and with much narrower entry points to those areas. Right now, young people just cannot expand their academic skills or gain wholesome knowledge by exploring SL. It’s the huge Percent of sexual stimulation in comparison to the small amount of education that is problematic for me.
I’ve been creating educational environments in MUVE’s and in virtual worlds such as SL for a good while, and I concur with much of what has been said about them. The learning curve is steep, and in a place such as SL, a person can be exposed to things inappropriate to an educational environment. I designed and developed a class last year in SL that put Korean and Texan students into a SL space where I hoped they would create a cultural contact zone in the process of collaborating on a project. It didn’t go well. In a survey and interviews after the class, students cited all of the things you’ve mentioned here: technical issues; user issues such as transporting and moving; being exposed to sexual and gambling messages. One would think, then, that this environment isn’t good for education. Yet, my edited collection on using virtual worlds for corporate education will be published this spring, and in it, many very promising ways to use virtual worlds for corporate education are proposed and some of the ways that it’s being used now are described. I describe, for instance, how roleplaying in a virtual world could be used for transformational learning and how coaching could be used effectively in a virtual world, in some ways to greater benefit that face-to-face coaching. Virtual worlds have great promise for education, especially if other technologies are integrated into them, another subject discussed in the book. SL might not be the thing. A software such as Wonderland might be better, or something else that’s on the horizon. I’ll be discussing subjects related to this on my blog at blog.cybermation-group.com
Best,
William