Staff and students have both left glowing testimonials regarding the University Of The West Of England’s MA Education in Virtual Worlds postgraduate course, which is taught entirely within Second Life. The course is produced via the Education Innovation Centre.
Liz Falconer, Professor of Technology Enhanced Learning at the UWE gave a little bit more background information regarding the University, explaining that the University has had its own charter since 1992 and covers a wide range of subjects. The University is also home to the world renowned Bristol Robotics Lab. The professor also elaborated a little more about the University’s use of virtual worlds, stating :
We use virtual environments to ready our students for practice in the real world, from law to forensics.
Senior Lecturer in Virtual Worlds, Dr Mari Carmen Gil Ortega said :
The quality of the students in the MA Education in Virtual Worlds, run by the University of the West of England, is unquestionable. I am impressed by the creativity of their work, their analytical skills and their insight and intuition. This shows in their work and assessments results which are outstanding. They also form a real community of practice and have lots of amazing skills to share with the real and the virtual world population. I consider myself privileged and fortunate to work with these talented people and observe their progress as they move through the programme.
I’ll have more from Dr Mari Carmen Gil Ortega later in this post, including a YouTube interview she recently gave. However the positive feedback came not just from staff members, students also joined in :
I am a PhD student having just completed 4 modules in this MA Programme as part of my degree requirements. My research is based on using the virtual world to enhance the learning of Computer Science at the HE level…….
I was privileged to have the opportunity to benefit from the wide range of skills, support and dedication of the academic staff on this programme, who built and advanced my expertise in employing this emerging technology in Higher Education, and well-prepared me to successfully achieve my PhD. – Beslam
Another student on the course to leave positive feedback was Aaron Griffiths. Aaron is Lecturer: Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology – Multiuser Virtual Environments and is also Director of the very interesting F/Xual Education Services. Aaron said of the course :
Its relevancy for educational practice goes far beyond virtual environments but obviously, given its focus, it does apply much of its theoretical knowledge towards the development of best practice in virtual worlds.
Aaron also explained that he has first hand knowledge of the course, having already completed the eight compulsory modules he is now into the final extended project.
Aaron also talked of the level of study required for the course, stating :
The level of study necessary was extremely high, requiring in-depth theoretical investigations of multiple disciplines alongside the development of practical skills applicable to the field.
Aaron’s testimony about the course also highlights the global nature of the course and this is undoubtedly one of the plus points of virtual worlds in distance learning. Aaron is based in New Zealand, the University running the course are based in England. The power of a virtual world to deliver such a high level course is something that Linden Lab and Second Life will be happy about. However other virtual worlds should also see the potential via use cases such as this.
This also brings us back to Dr Mari Carmen Gil Ortega. Dr Mari recently had an interview published with the EU funded Camelot Project. Camelot stands for “CreAting Machinima Empowers Live Online Language Teaching and Learning“, which is quite a mouthful, so I’ll stick with Camelot. The Camelot project is aimed at helping educators create machinima in virtual worlds for the purpose of language educators.
Whereas the interview does talk of machinima and language teaching, it also talks of the MA Education In Virtual Worlds too. The interview was recorded in Second Life and Dr Mari explains that the MAEW started in 2012 with seven students and a year later twenty one students registered for the course. Dr Mari explains that the course has attracted students from Europe, Argentina, Canada, United States and New Zealand.
Dr Mari also explains how she has created machinima for part of the course in the orientation module with regards to explaining how people can carry out tasks in Second Life, such as buying Linden Dollars. However at this time there is no requirement for students to create machinima as part of the course. Torley should be muscling in on this!
Dr Mari, who has a background in linguistics and language teaching also explains that there is definitely value in the use of machnima for language learning and explains that she used Second Life and machinima for the purpose of teaching Spanish in the past.
There’s more in the video, it runs for about eleven minutes and I found it rather interesting to hear how educators can make good use of machinima and virtual worlds.
SLURL : http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Innovation%20at%20UWE/129/224/27