Research

Quantitative learning outcome of the MIL course

Mariis1 Comment

12 students participated full time in the MIL course, one student divided his attention between SL and the second analytical object, the serious learning game, Global Conflicts, and 2 students who also chose Global Conflicts attended some SL activities ad hoc. The official learning goals of the course (regardless of choice) according to the MIL curriculum were;

The intellectual competence goals are that the student attains competence in:

  • identifying, reflecting on and appraising the scientific basis of ICT and didactic design formulating
  • analyzing and assessing problems within ICT and didactic design.

The professional competence goals are that the student attains competence in:

  • understanding and appraising theories and methods relating to didactic design
  • analyzing and assessing ICT based learning products and virtual learning environments on the basis of theories and methods relating to didactic design.

The practical competence goals are that the student attains competence in:

  • analyzing and assessing ICT based learning products and virtual learning environments on the basis of theories and methods relating to didactic design.

Besides these official goals, I stated that it was my hope that this SL course would force the students to reconsider familiar didactic elements and think out-of-the-box. When trying to articulate his learning outcome, one of the students suggested that this could be done in answering the following 3 questions; 1) What is your most significant learning outcome? 2) Has it been hard? And 3) How does this course differ from other MIL courses?

I think the second question is rather interesting and closely connected to the last question, but also to SL as a medium itself. It is widely recognized that SL has a very steep learning curve and that it takes a lot of time and effort to get accustomed to SL. Based on the general course findings and especially the many interesting discussion I had with the students I will return to this matter in a future post. In this post, I wish to focus on the course design and what this meant for the quantitative learning outcome in general.

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Didactic Design Discussion … on embodiment

The course is accredited with 4 ECTS points, which means that there is an expected workload of approx. 100 hours. MIL students are used to working hard, so I was a bit surprised when the student posed this particular question. On the other hand, I knew that this course was quite different from other MIL courses because of all the synchronous activities. Initially I told the students that I only expected them to participate in one synchronous activity in-world during the course, but all of them chose to participate in several. One of the major challenges of conducting distance education for further studies is to maintain a high level of flexibility. The MIL students are all attending the programme in their spare time from work and life in general, and most activities are asynchronous so that the students can chose to participate whenever they can fit it into their busy schedules. Since I knew that many of the students wouldn’t be able to attend on specific days, I tried to plan the activities covering most days of the week, including the weekends so that they had lots to choose from. From November 5th to December 15th there were a total of 25 activities with duration between 1-3 hours. The flip side to this was of course the risk that some students felt that they missed important stuff whenever they weren’t able to attend our in-world meetings. Furthermore the assessment criteria (a minimum of 3 postings in our asynchronous platform) of the course conflicted with the general workload. The students were asked to post their reflections in 5 different conferences covering essential didactic elements;

  1. Didactics and target groups – 32 postings by 12 students and me (8). Approx. 40 A4 pages.
  2. Orientation and navigation – 8 postings by 5 students and me (1). Approx. 8 A4 pages.
  3. Interaction – 0 posts!
  4. Learning processes – 68 posting by 11 students and me (21). Approx. 83 A4 pages.
  5. Audio-visuals – 9 postings by 2 students and me (4). Approx. 15 A4 pages.

Given that the official criteria was 3 postings corresponding to 3 A4 pages the degree of student activity has been uniquely high also considering the fact that besides these asynchronous discussions we had many, many long discussion in-world! I must say that I’m quite impressed :-)

Even though all students didn’t comment in all of the conferences it was clear from our in-world discussions that they had been reading and reflecting on all of the postings. We also had a general meta conference, which I mainly used to inform the students of upcoming activities and the students posted thoughts they could not fit into one of the 5 above mentioned conferences – there was a total of 232 postings there! Finally there was a conference where the students presented their avatars.

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Visiting The Connectivism Course in Chilbo …

MIL students are generally recognized for their huge engagement, but I have to say that this course has exceeded even my highest expectations and it quite funny since the students initially expressed anxiety and fear of not meeting the official criteria.

The assessment criteria and the workload were topics we discussed eagerly during the course, and these are didactic elements that I need to reconsider, not only because the workload may prevent some students from choosing this course in the future, but also because 3 asynchronous postings may not be the best way to show learning potential and outcome of SL. I will return to this in a future post where I’ll be evaluating the different in-world activities also. For now I’ll plunge into the students own articulations of their qualitative learning outcomes and return asap … but based on the course activities I think its safe to say that all the students reached the course goals admirably!
/Mariis

ScienceRoll – a new blog to explore

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I just discovered a blogger named, Bertalan Meskó – a last year medical student at the University of Debrecen, Hungary, who is exploring and blogging about medicine, especially genetics in relation to web 2.0.

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Even though medicine really isn’t my field of research a glance through Meskó’s posts promise interesting reading. Meskó has done interviews with a number of designers responsible for some of the great medical islands in-world – e.g. I’m looking forward to reading the interview with Dr. James Kinross who is working at the Imperial College of London (Division of Surgery, Oncology, Reproductive Biology and Anaesthetics) and is a pioneer in conducting medical simulations in SL. I’ve visisted Imperial College of London’s loaction in-world several times, and of course it’ll be interesting to learn what one of the founders has to say.

Another great medical place in-world is the Genome Island, and Meskó also has an interview and a video on this. Interested in in-world educational design and research methods (e.g. interviews) as I am,  this blog really looks promising :-)

/Mariis

Visit to Rockcliffe/ Phelan Corrimal

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On Monday November 24th the MIL students and I visited Phelan Corrimal at Rockcliffe University. The Rockcliffe University Consortium is a distance learning organization servicing worldwide virtual learners and businesses. Located in Canada, the United States and the metaverse Rockcliffe University Consortium provides education, training and real time collaboration for its virtual members by incorporating interactive 3D immersive learning environments. Rockcliffe also is one of the Metanomics partners hosting part of the community on Mondays. Phelan is the President of Rockcliffe and is a very experienced in-world resident, so it was a great privilege that he took the time to share some of his thought on metaverse-based education and give us a tour to some of the locations on Rockcliffe’s many islands.

We started off in the reception area, unfortunately I had some initial voice-problems, but Phelan and the students seemed to manage just fine without me :-)

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At the Rockcliffe reception listening to Phelan

While we were standing in the reception area an unknown avatar arrived. Usually when an avatar arrives in the middle of a discussion he/she will be greeted in the text-chat, but this was not the case. The students and I discussed this later on, since it was a breach in normal behavior, and we all agreed that the reason why nobody greeted this particular avatar was that he/she had explicit sexual references in his title. All of us are adults, pretty open minded and I don’t think any of us are particularly sensitive, but somehow sexual references just wasn’t appropriate in this context. Interestingly, the avatar representation made it more obvious that we were ignoring somebody and I did feel a bit impolite – a sentiment I don’t think I would have had, if I had just been ignoring a textual message …

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Investigating one of the more traditional classrooms

One of the topics Phelan talked about was how to create sustainable education in the metaverse. Unlike other in-world projects Rockcliffe isn’t funded by organizations or sponsors and developing a sustainable economy is one of the biggest challenges Phelan and his staff are facing. We discussed the possibility of having open classes with the option to buy some sort of certification, diploma or the like afterwards. It’s my impression that Phelan very much would like to employ a temporary kind of open-content’ish principle to their in-world work, but that’s easier said than done!

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Another type of classroom

Phelan had been attending the E-Learn World Conference in Las Vegas a few days before meeting us, and as he explained his head was filled with lots of inspiration. One of these sources of inspiration was Constance Steinkuehler (though I’m not sure she attended the above mentioned conference), who has done extensive research into MMOs, including learning potentials, cognitive theory and media literacy. Apparently she’s also looking at Second Life and explores the “3rd Places” concept  in that context. As far as I know, the  concept of “3rd Places” was coined by Ray Oldenburg in his book The Great Good Place, and can be used to define places where we gather publicly to facilitate and strengthen local democracy and community. Both references surely need a closer investigation in the future.

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Visiting the Metanomics show from the Rockcliffe partner location

We ended the tour in one of the less traditional classroom settings where Phelan and his staff have experimented with building interactive learning objects – some of them supplemented by both text and voice-over instructions. Some of the courses at Rockcliffe are designed to learn building in-world and this is one of the areas used for that, including a large sandbox. This is also one of the areas that Phelan hopes to find time to expand and further develop in the future.

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Studying an interactive learning object

I had the great pleasure of meeting Phelan RL at The SLCC’08 in Florida in September, and we had some fun and very interesting talks during the convention. Phelan, in my view, truly is of the metaverse visionaries and I’m really grateful that he took the time to meet us. I know the students appreciate these meetings with other avatars/people very much, and with his interest in e-learning and research Phelan was a very relevant and good guy to visit – TY Phelan :-)

/Mariis

NMC Publishes Results of 2008 SL-Educators Survey

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New Media Consortium (NMC) has conducted its second annual survey of educators in SL, which provides a yearly snapshot of the demographics and activities of educators who are active in SL.

A link to the survey was sent to by email to individuals within the NMC’s SLcommunities and to the SL Educators Listserv (SLED). 358 individuals responded to the survey, a 170% increase from the number who answered last years survey.

Quoted below are a few highlights of NMC’s own comparison to the 2007 survey:

Educators are moving from exploration to use of Second Life for teaching and learning. More respondents report being involved in an educational-related activity in Second Life (increasing from 54% in 2007 to 71% in 2008). More than half report that the organization they are affiliated with owns a sim (up from 36% in 2007) and 74 individuals report in 2008 they own their own sim. This year 29% of survey participants report holding virtual office hours in SL; 37 of them (12%) have taught a class entirely in SL (up from 14 or 8% in 2007).

Educators are expanding their Second Life social networks. This year recorded an increase in the numbers of people educators maintain as contacts. In 2007, 53% reported 10 or fewer contacts while in 2008 , this percentage dropped to 32%. The most common range for the size of their contact list in 2008 was 11-30 and the number reporting more than 100 contacts doubled from 2007 (4% to 8%).

This year’s educators are much more experienced in Second Life. The percentage who have been in Second Life for 1-3 years increased from 30% in 2007 to 56% this year. However, the demographics of this group are about the same; in terms of game experience most self-classify as “Pac-Man” generation. More than two-thirds are between 36 and 55 years old, and more than 75% do not play console games or MMORPGs. Also similar to last year, about half of the respondents find time for Second Life by watching less television.

You’ll find the survey summary and results as pfd-files at the bottom of this page.

/Mariis

A visit to The Funny Farm?

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Today my MIL students had their second building class skillfully facilitated by Dr. Asp and Heidi Ballinger. When we returned to the sandbox it was clear that some of the students had been practicing their building skills since last class:

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As the class started I took off looking for animal avatar shapes, which one of the students had expressed an interest in. I found several places, and naturally I was too curios not to try some of the shapes I found. Unfortunately I’m having trouble getting some of the shapes off again, so for now I look like an elephant!

By the end of the class I returned to see, what they all had been up to. Ballinger was showing the students a building tool, Prim Finder, created by Anthony Hocken from Crystal Gadgets.

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Ballinger was in her famous Panda look, I was the big clumsy elephant and maybe some of the students will try out new shapes … so who knows, perhaps by the end of the MIL course it will be like visiting the Funny Farm :-)

/Mariis