Educators Should Look To The Past Before Moving Forward With Education In Virtual Reality

Back in February 2010, Jeffrey R. Young published an article on The Chronicle Of Higher Education : After Frustrations in Second Life, Colleges Look to New Virtual Worlds. The article, as the title suggests, delved into areas of frustration for educators such as performance, navigation, ease of use and :

Plus, a lot of decidedly nonacademic activity goes on in Second Life, and it’s difficult to limit access so that only students can enter a classroom there. Online vandalism is so common that there’s a name for it (“griefing”), and it’s easy to stumble into areas designed for virtual sex that is, ahem, graphic.

Jeffrey makes a far point about griefing but I’m sure that part of the reason his article rubbed many Second Life users up the wrong way was due to the complaint about nonacademic activity. Second Life was not created as an education product.

A very interesting and very telling point from Jeffrey’s article though was the willingness of educators to look at alternatives, continue with Second Life and persevere with the goal of virtual education :

What surprised me the most was that, despite these challenges, educators appear more interested than ever in the idea of teaching in video-game-like realms. A group of college folks interested in virtual environments organized by Educause, the higher-education-technology organization, has a growing membership. Tellingly, though, it recently changed its name from the Second Life group to the Virtual Worlds group, in part reflecting an eagerness to find alternatives.

I was actually subscribed to the mailing list at the time when the change of name was made from Second Life to Virtual Worlds. This wasn’t solely due to educators wanting to explore other virtual worlds, there was also the issue of Linden Lab’s branding policy regarding the use of the Second Life name at the time, but many welcomed the move to discuss and explore alternative virtual worlds.

This week Jeffrey has published another article on The Chronicle of Higher Education regarding Second Life, Virtual Worlds and education : Remember Second Life? Its Fans Hope to Bring VR Back to the Classroom.  The headline and opening text is likely to rub Second Life users up the wrong way. Jeffrey has experience of this as he discussed his 2010 article in the more recent article :

In 2010 I wrote an article for The Chronicle pointing out that some colleges were moving away from Second Life, arguing that the virtual world hadn’t lived up to the hype. I got more hate mail for that article than for anything else I’d ever done. And in one of the strangest moments of my journalism career, I was invited to discuss that article in a forum within Second Life called Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable.

As we can see from the link to the discussion, Jeffrey got a hostile reaction. I will say at this point that disagreeing with Jeffrey is fine, but sending him hate mail is not. Second Life users have hopefully grown thicker skins by now.

The more interesting part of the recent article is that whilst Jeffrey himself sounds sceptical about education in virtual worlds and virtual reality, plenty of others are still excited by the potential. Jeffrey talked to A.J. Kelton , director of emerging and instructional technology at Montclair State University. A.J Kelton is still involved in virtual worlds and you can see his passion in the article, especially when it comes to connecting with your avatar :

When people create an avatar for themselves, especially one that they can customize on their own, there is a sense of belonging, the sense that that avatar actually represents you. People definitely psychologically bond to that avatar, to the point where the research showed that people who experienced something in a virtual world could also internalize that.

Some people are more distant from their avatars than others of course.

Jeffrey didn’t just talk to educators though, he also spoke to Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg, who is not surprisingly, upbeat about the potential for educational use in virtual reality. Where Ebbe really makes a strong point is in discussing use cases where virtual reality can deliver an experience that text books simply cannot. The immersive experience :

I think virtual reality will play a role where you can put students in context of places. The way I learned history back in my day, it couldn’t have been any more boring, reading textbooks about the Romans. Take me there. I’m a much more visual learner; take me to Rome and let me walk around with the Romans at that time and see what it was like back then.

Using virtual worlds, virtual reality or any new technology to deliver experiences that text books cannot reach is a very good use case.

However, as Jeffrey points out in his article, there are colleges and universities still using virtual worlds such as Second Life today, despite the fact that some people still express surprise that Second Life is still around. The Education & Nonprofit section of the Second Life Destination Guide lists quite a few places that you can visit to see what educators are doing within Second Life.

I can understand why Second Life, OpenSim users and educators who embrace virtual worlds get a tad annoyed regarding discussion of education in virtual worlds. Whereas it may not have reached the heights some hoped for, it is still happening. The potential for virtual worlds to deliver distance learning still very much exists and there are use cases available, but all too often they get overlooked.

The hype cycle of virtual reality has of course got people, including educators, excited but there are lessons to be learnt from the experiments educators have already participated in regarding virtual world education. One of the most glaring being that it’s better to use new technology to deliver experiences that existing technology simply cannot.

The technology needs to be used to deliver feature rich, easy to navigate experiences. Some of the complaints about griefers and even, those nonacademic users, may well be addressed too. After all Linden Lab’s Project Sansar bills itself as :

“We want to lower the barrier of entry for VR experience creation,” said Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab. “Project Sansar will do for virtual experiences what WordPress has done for the Web: empower a broad range of people to create with professional quality and reach global audiences. By greatly expanding who can create virtual experiences, Project Sansar will also extend the value of VR to a wide variety of use-cases — from gaming and entertainment to education, architecture, art, community-building, business meetings, healthcare, conferences, training, and more.”

Then there are products such as High Fidelity, which is open source and doesn’t require you to connect to a larger metaverse if you do not want to. That is an option that will surely appeal to many educators.

The future for education in virtual reality and virtual worlds looks rather bright, but it will require educators to embrace the technology to do more than just replicate existing experiences. Educators will also have to be nice to their IT Departments and be realistic with their aims, which may be a bigger challenge!

Please read Jeffrey’s article or, if you prefer, listen to the podcast that is on the same page as the article.