The Future of Online Learning in 3D
The use of multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) for higher education may once have seemed a futuristic fantasy. Since 2007, the New Media Consortium's Horizon Report has been indicating increasing use of virtual worlds for education.
While far from mainstream, virtual worlds such as Second Life and Active Worlds are on the rise. The NMC estimates that more than 1,200 educational "islands" were created in Second Life in 2007 and the number has been growing steadily since. The NMC's 2008 survey of educators using Second Life revealed that 44% thought the medium has high potential for widespread use in distance education.
In a 2008 article for EDUCAUSE Review titled "Virtual Worlds? Outlook Good," A.J. Kelton, the director of Emerging Instructional Technology in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Montclair State University reported that a listserv for the Second Life educational community lists close to 5,000 members.
Kelton goes on to explain that in 2008, "the traditional student base (ages 18-24) makes up 22.71 percent of those using Second Life. Those in the nontraditional student brackets of ages 25-34 and ages 35-44 make up 35.14 percent and 24.18 percent, respectively, for a total of 59.32 percent - a very nice pool of potential students."
Virtual Worlds Prepare Students for the Future
"My students will be going into the future and I want them prepared for it," says Dr. Charles Wankel, an associate Professor of Management at St. John's University in New York and the author of many books, including Higher Education in Virtual Worlds: Teaching and Learning in Second Life.
"One of the crazy ideas that people have is that students will go in and sit down and listen to a lecture in Second Life. That happens, of course, but I see the strength of using Second Life for team projects," says Wankel. "Having students do team projects in Second Life is a way for students to get to know each other and learn collaboration, the key business skill of the 21st century. In New York state, an accreditation criteria is interactivity. These sorts of Second Life team exercises help fulfill that requirement."
Wankel also uses Second Life as a lab to give students experience running businesses - entrepreneurial and sales experiences they can apply in the real world. "At Seton University, people the House of Seven Gables in literature courses. In Second Life, they're building it," says Wankel.
Good Design: "The effect can be wondrous"
Randall Hinrichs is affiliate faculty of the Information School at University of Washington and created the certificate program in virtual worlds construction there. He believes we are just beginning to scratch the surface of what can be taught and learned in MUVEs. Hinrichs defines virtual worlds as anything that uses 3D interactive avatars and in which you can solve problems and program content - not just virtual meeting rooms. "Like good instruction, when the environment is designed to be technically sound, pedagogically sound, user friendly, tool rich, and enhanced with ample learning archetypes the effect can be wondrous."
"I think medical education is the killer app for virtual worlds," says Hinrichs. You don't want to be programming anthropomorphic avatars but you want to be the cell, and have the chemistry and biology of programmed into the environment so you can fight cancer cells. Students could be the objects they're studying."
Another application of virtual worlds for distance education is virtual role playing, acting out scenarios. "The nursing community wants to be able to have case based problems to solve," says Hinrichs. "A young nurse trainee would go into the emergency ward and be given five tasks to do, she's given a communication device and being called up to maternity, she has to look at somebody's chart to see what drug was just administered - these scenarios are stronger than role play because it's immersion in the profession itself."
Increasing human-computer interaction
Hinrichs has seen the future, and it is the increasing integration of man and machine. Far from the realm of fantasy, many new technologies already exist, at least in prototype form. "There are brain interfaces that we've seen at the Federal Consortium of Virtual Worlds where - I'm serious about this - you think about where your avatar is going and it moves in that direction via this device you put on your head."
"The next generation of technology - from touch surfaces, to biosensors, brain and body controllers, wearables, 3D television, cell phones, robots - must converge and get incorporated into the learning environment to bring the outside inside into virtual worlds, and the inside outside to the physical world," he says. "This is where the learner lives - on the edge of theory and practice, virtual and real."
Current generation of learners and the next will demand 3D
"I think the 3D web is going to become prominent. You're starting to see it now with Google and NASA that are making you come into 3D applications," says Hinrichs. "I'd say the demand will be coming from not even the next generation but the current one. They're going to demand it in education and in their workplace when they get there. 'Why are you doing everything in 2D?' they'll say."
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