Teaching with Technology

This article describes the use of a virtual world, Second Life (SL), in a six-week graduate course in e-commerce offered at Iowa State University to 29 students. The course documented in this article was a first time experience utilizing SL for instruction at Iowa State both for the participating faculty and students.

For those who have not experienced SL, it is a lot like navigating through a 3-D video game. Each user has a virtual representation of him- or herself (an “avatar”) and can encounter and interact with other users’ avatars. The physical rules (“laws of nature”) and makeup of the SL virtual world are malleable and can be structured for specific learning activities. SL has its own currency; various forms of businesses including retail shops and e-commerce are prevalent within SL.

The authors describe a differentiation between “immersion” and “presence” that has been made in the academic literature around the use of virtual worlds. “Immersion” is the pervasive use of the virtual world platform for the delivery of course content, and as such is objectively quantifiable, whereas “presence” or the sense of actual engagement in the virtual world and more dependent on psychological states of “being there”.

From the article it appears the original plan was to provide a platform for students to experience presence in a robust virtual world:

The vibrant character of this environment offers particularly attractive opportunities for teaching business-related concepts. SL is designed as a self-contained economy, complete with its own currency and currency exchange, the LindeX. Business activity is thriving and growing with residents retaining intellectual property rights to the items they create. A resident can build a virtual object like a chair, sell it to other residents, and invest the earnings in a new accessory for her avatar. In addition, because residents can convert their Linden dollars to real world currency, they make real world profits from their SL activities. In other words, entrepreneurs can start and run virtual businesses in a manner quite similar to the way people engage in business in the real world. A unique virtual environment, where entrepreneurship is so readily on display, SL might become a useful tool for exposing students to business and e-commerce concepts.

Consistent with this objective, the article states,

The instructor of the MBA course described in this paper used SL to create this sense of presence in an active economy in order to evoke student engagement and strong interest in the subject matter, e-commerce and entrepreneurship.

Except, that wasn’t exactly how the course evolved over the six week term. The authors note a steep learning curve, significant time and high levels of frustration were devoted to setting up avatars and learning to navigate SL. A “scavenger hunt” completed by students working in teams provided opportunities for students to learn more about SL, and guest speakers addressed the class and conducted product demonstrations within SL; students synchronously participated from different physical locations (e.g., from Dubai); however, comments suggest that the virtual world of SL itself presented challenging obstacles for students to overcome rather than serving as a transparent medium in which students could work on issues pertaining to course content.

Rather than establishing a sense of “presence,” the authors conclude they realized only “immersion”. And so they offer these suggestions for developing an immersion course:

-Seek out and make use of existing teaching and technology support structures within the university.
-An instructor will be more successful with the assistance from professional support staff.
-Administrators’ support is essential.
-When introducing a virtual world into a course for the first time, budget considerable time for planning, design, and implementation of course content and infrastructure.
-An instructor will be more successful when an investment is made in planning and designing how a virtual world’s content will be meshed with the course content.
-It is important to orient students in their exploration of a virtual world.
-Students will benefit from an advanced notice of the use of a virtual world in the course.
-Students must be provided tools to support their immersion in a virtual world.
-An instructor must invest in planning and designing infrastructure to use a virtual world for teaching and learning.

Based on the reported student responses to this course the foregoing lessons were earned at the proverbial “school of hard knocks”. Much of the reported learning that occurred seemed to be more about SL and less about e-commerce.

Among my conclusions from this article is that it’s tough to be on the leading edge of innovation at any institution. The authors here needed to set up even the most rudimentary interfaces in SL for their students. They were starting from ground zero. Particularly on the heels of a previous JOLT article about the case method I was excited at the prospect of seeing virtual “user-created” cases of entrepreneurial e-commerce instruction.

As noted above, students reported high levels of frustration with basic set-up processes in SL. The authors conclude,

Presence takes time and effort as an individual chooses to become involved with the SL community and depends on a variety of subjective psychological factors. For this course the feeling could have influenced the effectiveness of student learning. On the other side, intense presence might have been distracting learners from an unbiased evaluation of the economic processes of SL. To assess this hypothesis, the instructor designed a slip-on avatar course the following semester, in which fully configured and ready-to-go slip-on avatars were distributed to students. The research findings from the slip-on avatar course will be disseminated in a separate paper.

Source: Brian Mennecke, Hassall, L. and Triplett, J., “The Mean Business of Second Life: Teaching Entrepreneurship, Technology and e-Commerce in Immersive Environments,” MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, Vol. 4, No. 3 (September 2008): 339-348.