SLOODLE Case Study: University of the West of Scotland

8/14/2019 SLOODLE Case Study: University of the West of Scotland

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University of the West of Scotland:

Tale of Two Classes

This case study outlines how SLOODLE tools were used to supportteaching and learning with Second Life in two classes at the Universityof the West of Scotland. One class was an honours year option in whichSecond Life was a core part of a course where students developedsignificant group projects using or extending Second Life. In contrast,Second Life was only briefly used in the second, online only, class. Butdespite with very little experience of the platform students were able touse Second Life for class presentations, thanks to SLOODLE.This case-study assumes some familiarity with common Second Life

terms.


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Second Life and SL are trademarks of Linden Research, Inc.

SLOODLE is funded and supported by Eduserv

SLOODLE is supported by the San Jos State University School of Libraryand Information Science

SLOODLE is supported by the University of the West of Scotland

SLOODLE is an Open-Source project, released under GNU Public License.More details at http://www.SLOODLE.org

In the following case study you will see the following symbols used: This is a note, and may indicate an alternative use of SLOODLE or

other aside.

Good practice tip a tip which might make running a class withSecond Life and SLOODLE go more smoothly.


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The Two Courses

Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVE) is an honours year optionalmodule in which students learn about and use a range of collaborativetechnologies. Group projects develop applications and new tools for usingthe technologies, or extend the technologies themselves. Second Life hasbeen a core element of this class for the past three years.In contrast, Introduction to Virtual Worlds (IVW) is a second year distancelearning class offered to students through the universitys LifelongLearning program. This class has been taken by a mix of full time andpart time students, and students explore a range of different virtual worldplatforms, looking at their use in a range of application areas fromentertainment to education and corporate applications. Second Life wasonly introduced towards the endof this class.

Moodle

SLOODLE integrates Second Lifewith the popular, open-source,VLE/LMS 'Moodle'. Moodleprovides a flexible web-basedplatform where tutors cancustomise course pages by addingor removing a wide range ofactivities and content 'blocks'. For

more on Moodle, see http://www.moodle.org/

Setting Up

Preparations for the classes started with setting up the Moodle courses.The Moodle site was given a distinct and enhanced look by using theThemZa Global Network theme from the Moodle themes database.

Adding a custom theme is the easiest and perhaps most effectiveway of enhancing the look and feel of Moodle. A large database offree themes can be found at http://bit.ly/Dxwvo

Collaborative Virtual Environments

The CVE course was campus based but delivered at two campuses sometwo hours travelling time apart (Paisley and Dumfries). Lectures wereshared using video-conferencing, while labs used Second Life allowingstudents on both campuses to interact with each other throughout thetimetabled hours. The Moodle course page was central to co-ordinatingstudent activity, and preparation of this involved:

Adding a Teleport Now button to take students to class area inSecond Life. This used a SLurl and an image of the virtual island

taken from Second Life. News and discussion forums


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Blocks added to page for link to Moodle blog (Blog block) and to anexternally hosted blog used for written assignments (RSS block).

Once groups had been selected and set up on Moodle (see below),chatrooms were created for each groups private use and a Groupdiscussion forum added this single forum allowed users to filter

discussions based on group membership.

Have your Moodle course pages prepared for students before the

class starts this is especially important for distance learning andoff campus students! Decide which activities and blocks you will beusing and customize the course page accordingly.

Students, Groups and Student Choice

The first class activity tasked students tointroduce themselves to their classmatesover video-conferencing link. An outline of

the course was presented, and a range ofpossible projects were suggested forstudents to consider and select.With students from a range of backgrounds,some projects focussed more on theunderlying technology of Second Life,instead of its applications. The four projectsselected were:

Second Life client mod project. The Second Life client is opensource, and it is possible for students to download and modify the

source code itself, programming in C++. This was of interest to


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students interested in working on more significant software

engineering challenges, working with real code. Second Life bot project. There are a range of Artificial Intelligence

based bot/chat-bot technologies already available for use withSecond Life. Students worked with these to develop AI guides for

Second Life. Develop a virtual world campus for UWS. Approximately half of the

land area of the university sim was allocated to the large groupworking on this project.

Develop a web and virtual world presence to promote/support theHomecoming Scotland tourism marketing campaign. About onefifth of the sim was allocated for this (more narrowly focussed)projects use.

Getting Started with Second Life

The first weeks lab activity in Second Life focussed on ensuring that allstudents were able to register accounts on Second Life and from there tosimply log into Second Life, find the university sim and to experiment withthe building tools.

Once students had logged in, the first activity was to join the classgroup without expending a lot of time, students were quicklyintroduced to chat, IM and group IM communications.

Depending on your class, exploring avatar identities andexperimenting with appearance may be a class activity or, as here,

left for students to explore in their own time. Some students in theclasses described here used default avatars throughout otherswere significantly more experimental.

Students appeared to master communication quite quickly prepared byprior experience with other internet based text-chat applications. Ratherthan expend time ensuring students mastered the finer points ofcommunications, an introductory building activity completed the first labsession.

For some student cohorts and classes there are potential benefits inintroducing object creation in Second Life as soon as possible.Positive results were gained from this approach with digital artstudents in the JISC OpenHABITAT project, for example.

A SLOODLE distributor pre-prepared by the tutor with a selected range of'freebie' objects allowing students to finish the session by playingaround with existing Second Life content. The Object Distributor is an Second Life distribution system which

can be accessed from Moodle. In Second Life, a distributor was set

up prior to the class coming to Second Life and a large and varied


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array of free items clothing, custom avatars and accessories

placed inside for students to play with and explore.

Group Work

Students were placed into groups at the start of the second lab session.Students were asked to start the lab session in SL by clicking on aregistration booth that was set up in the class sand-box area. By following

simple prompts, and logging intoMoodle, the students' avatars are thenpaired with their Moodle user accounts a simple but necessary step for fulluse of SLOODLE.

Each group then retreated to a separatechat area to discuss their group goals

and plans. Each chat area was providedwith a SLOODLE web-intercom,connected to a Moodle chatroom.

Web-intercom automatically archives in-world discussions on theMoodle web-site. Students reported that this was particularly usefulfor reviewing agreed goals, objectives and progress.Formally introducing tools in lab activities can highlight theirpotential applications to students who might otherwise not makeuse of the tools.

The synchronous in world discussion was extended with groupsadditionally using the Moodle forums, Google Docs, file-sharing sites andbulletin-boards as they worked on their projects over succeeding weeks.Again, Google Docs was used in a lab activity - few of the students hadmade much prior use of Google Docs, and even fewer were aware of thesynchronous editing and sharing capabilities.

Virtual Classroom Activities

The taught component of the course was primarily delivered via video

conferencing, with a few of the lectures taking place in Second Life itself.

One lecture was a review of teaching tools in Second Life. To helpmaintain engagement during this lecture a SLOODLE Choice tool wasprepared and used as a form of audience response system, or clicker.With options ranging in a five-point scale from Always/Strongly Agree toSloodle to Never/Strongly Disagree, it was possible to ask questions ata number of points through the class and quickly obtain a visual indicationof the student feedback. Additionally, in this and other in-world sessionsstudents were required to move between different locations in Second Life

to view different artefacts.


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It is not always possible to ascertain whether or not a student is still

at their keyboard let alone whether they are reading email orbrowsing the web while logged in. Asking students to reply toquestions or moving the whole group at irregular intervals can helpensure that students remain focussed on the class.

Virtual Field Trips

Virtual field trips can be veryeasy to arrange in Second Life with content creators ofteneager to show-off theircreations. This is true of manycommercial, corporate,governmental or academicsites. One of the CVE class

field trips was to the in-worldcampus for the OpenUniversity, a tour led by AnnaPeachey.

To enable the automaticlogging and archive of chat from the virtual field trip, a web-intercom waswornby the tutor by dragging from inventory onto his avatar. Theintercom could then be taken with the group to each location visited (seepicture), and worked as normal.

Second Life terms-of-service require that permission is obtainedbefore logging chat, and this is requested when the intercom isclicked on. The intercom only records chat from avatars who agreeto the logging.On a private sim it is possible to establish terms of use that make itclear to visitors that their chat will be logged and the intercomscripts can be modified accordingly.

Introduction to Virtual Worlds

The Introduction to virtual worlds class spent only a few weeks withSecond Life, after undertaking activities in a wide range of alternativevirtual worlds in previous weeks. The homepage for this course was,again, a Moodle site. A key feature for this distance learning class was theuse of Moodle discussion forums for asyncrhonous discussions betweenclasses, and a wiki in which students wrote their individual chapters for aclass project a text on virtual worlds.

There were few opportunities to use SLOODLE tools to support this class,as only the final few weeks of activities took place in Second Life and the

students were not tasked with any form of content creation. However,students did need to give presentations to the class in Second Life and


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the SLOODLE presenter was

used for this. This allowed thestudents to focus on thecontent of their presentations,without having to worry about

how to import or upload texturesin Second Life or even how toedit notecards while allowingstudents with prior Second Life experience to enhance their presentationswith 3D content.

Instead, each student was giventeacherpermissions on a presentationin the Moodle site. This allowed them to upload slides, images and evenvideos onto the web, and to have this media automatically streamed intoSecond Life onto a presenter display rezzed inworld by the class tutor.

Summary

Over two different classes, with very different aims and objectives,SLOODLE tools provided support to tutor and to students in teaching andlearning. Students themselves made effective use of SLOODLE tools insupporting group work activities and for presenting their own work toother students inworld in a short period of time, without having to firstbecome conversant with object creation and editing in the virtual world.

More SLOODLE

This case-study illustrates the use of a just some of the SLOODLE toolsand features.

Interested and want to know more? Visit the SLOODLE project homepagehttp://www.sloodle.org . Here youll find forums for users anddevelopers (all welcome!) as well as Spanish language forums. Theforums are active, and most requests for help are answered within 24hours, sometimes significantly less.Youll also find links to our wiki, tutorial videos and a whole lot more!

Visit the SLOODLE homepage - http://www.SLOODLE.org

or cometo one of our regular inworld meetings to learn more.

About Moodle

The SLOODLE homepage has been created using Moodle, the open-sourcelearning and content management system. You can learn more aboutMoodle at http://www.moodle.org/

Moodle is used by over 30 million students and tutors worldwide, and is

the virtual learning environment of choice for thousands of schools,colleges, universities and businesses.

Documents

SLOODLE Case Study: University of the West of Scotland