Second Life at UWE

The new web pages for the course are at http://www.uwe.ac.uk/elearning/virtualWorldsMA/index.shtml and will grow as the course develops.

We’ve been given the go-ahead to begin developing a new Master’s programme in which students will be exploring education in virtual worlds. The programme is planned to go to validation in September 2011 with a planned start date in January 2012. The course will be delivered entirely online, both in Second Life and through the use of VLE and “Web 2.0″ collaboration technologies. It will therefore be able to be studied anywhere in the world – with the usual caveats about time zones But we will be making it as widely available as possible. Prospective students will be able to register for the whole course or parts of it, and even for individual activities like seminar or workshop series.

We’ll be putting up more information in the next few weeks on our website, but if anyone has any questions about the course you can always email us at elearning@uwe.ac.uk .

I posted a few months ago about the SHE grants that UWE made available for colleagues who want to develop online simulations as part of their curricula. The university funded five projects, and they’ve just made their first interim reports. I won’t publish them here yet, as they were for internal use. I will post more detail this year as the projects progress, but for now, here are the five projects and the technologies each of them is using.

Ethics and corporate social responsibility simulator – Second Life.  Led by David Wornham (Faculty of Business and Law)

Integrated disaster response and recovery simulator – SIMITA (Blackboard/Sharepoint/Wimba mashup). Led by Dr Wendy Woodland (Faculty of Environment and Technology)

Virtual drug round – Second Life.  Led by Fiona Bastow (Faculty of Health and Life Sciences)

Sociology and criminology simulations – Second Life. Led by John Bird (Faculty of Creative Arts, Humanities and Education)

Simulating commercial transactions and disputes – SIMITA.  Led by Rachel Wood (Faculty of Business and Law).

The ethics and corporate social responsibility simulator will take place in a newly-built office tower block, which has just started construction. Once again it is a collaboration with our good friends and colleagues at Citrus Virtual. Here’s an early picture of the reception for the office block. We’re going for a form of Art Deco design, so the outside will eventually be reminiscent of the Chrysler Building

The office block reception under construction

So, we didn’t win the THE Award for outstanding ICT innovation, but it was great to be in the last 6 (3 of which were virtual world projects!), and fantastic to see all the nominations in the various categories. There is some really great work going on in all kinds of fields in UK universities – lets hope that recent events and future funding cuts don’t undermine it.

Accident investigation interviews

We’ve run the accident investigation and risk assessment simulations with our postgrad students, and today I’ll be running the risk assessment for our undergrads. That’ll give us a cohort of around 50 – 60 students this year, so it’ll be interesting to see if the evaluations come out similarly to last academic year.

We’ve finished the analysis of last year’s evaluation research, and the results are now on our technology enhanced learning website. Please feel free to take a look. We’ll have papers coming out about our evaluations too, but journals can take quite a while! Happy to discuss anything that arises from our research – you can leave comments on this blog and/or on our research website too. Happy to take ideas too

The estimated total world population is around 6.8 billion. The number of virtual world accounts worldwide has just topped 1 billion. So, even though quite a few people are likely to have more than one virtual world account, that still means that a surprisingly high proportion of the world’s population has a virtual world account.  46% of those accounts are held by children aged 10 – 15, that’s 468 million accounts. The organsiations that watch these things, like kzero, predict that the age group to watch in the next 18 months for increased usage of virtual worlds is the 15 – 25 year olds. What is the main age group of university entrants??

We’re really pleased to have been shortlisted in the Outstanding ICT Innovation of the Year category this year for the Simulations in Higher (SHE) education initiative, of which the Second Life simulations are an important part. You can read about what the SHE initiative is all about on our website and the full list of shortlists for all the THE categories is here. Wish us luck on the night!!

We’re working with Citrus Virtual on another simulator to support our Environmental Health students. This time it’s a risk assessment simulator, set in a boat hire premises. It will have a small workshop, LPG store and other risky goodies, together with public access for the hire of pleasure boats. Visitors will actually be able to take boat rides around both our islands and through the straits of … Hmm, haven’t thought of a name for the stretch of water between the two islands. Maybe we should have a competition! 

As the risk assessment project progresses there’ll be lots of info on this blog. For now, pics below, as usual.

We’ve expanded our real estate holdings in SL with the purchase of a neighbouring island, which we’ve named UWE North Island. As we’re based in Bristol in the UK in the real world, the two islands are joined by a suspension bridge. Not up to Mr Brunel’s standards, but pretty good all the same! Here are some pics.

We have a number of SL simulation projects planned across the university this next semester, so there’ll be plenty going on on this blog after the summer break. Watch this space!

As the academic year draws to a close, it’s helpful to look back at what we’ve been doing this year, and the really exciting time we’ve had with the SL accident investigation. We’ve just completed the evaluation of this year’s activity and we’re in the process of analysing all the data from surveys, observations and focus groups. When we have detailed analysis and reports ready they’ll go up on our e-learning research website at http://telr.uwe.ac.uk . In the meantime, here are some simple graphs that show the general reactions of the students to the experience. You can see that they were somewhat trepidatious about using SL  before the exercise began, but that they felt it was a very positive experience once they got into it. If you can’t read the legend to these graphs, just double click on them to open larger versions.