Nesson chose to offer her course in Second Life “to make a distance-education experience feel like a more substantial, more connected experience so that they would have someplace where they could come and actually get to interact directly with each other and with the instructors.”
How exactly will classes meet in Second Life? “I think this is a real Petri dish for teaching and learning experimentation,” says Jeremy Kemp, a doctoral student at Fielding Graduate University and the proprietor ofhttp://simteach.com, a resource center for educators using MUVEs.
“There’s a fine balance there between offering the learning experience that students expect and utilizing the flexibility of the environment.” Several campuses, resources, and research displays have already been established in-world. Some are mirror images of real-life buildings; for example, Harvard Law School’s Austin Hall is operated on the island by the law school’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, a real-world research facility devoted to studying and exploring cyberspace. Others reflect the imagination and ingenuity of the developers and instructors behind them. On Campus Island, research projects are displayed on floating platforms, and some even invite visitors to participate in a sample experiments.
One instructor paying particular attention to her students’ environment is Sarah Robbins, a PhD candidate at Ball State University who is studying rhetoric and composition. This fall, she will meet with her English-composition undergrads in real life one day of the week and in SL on another. Robbins, a/k/a Intellagirl Tully, has put a lot of thought into her island, offering her students lounge areas for meetings, a Tiki bar, and dorm areas they can decorate by working together.
“I’m very interested in how virtual environments can foster collaboration and community building in the class itself,” she says. Since so much of her class is centered on observation and research, the SL community as a whole will also play a major role, providing her students with interview subjects and discussion.
“I’ve been in lots of MMORPGs [Massive Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games] and run into some nasty people,” Robbins says. “I’ve not seen any of that in SL. ... I feel like I can trust the community to be encouraging so long as my students are [not] bothersome.”
It is perhaps because the SL community is characterized by civility that in-world learning has the potential to promote respectful, supportive classroom behavior. According to Jeremy Kemp, “When you have the other person looking at you in the face, it’s kind of hard to be mean, and so it helps to generate an altruistic environment.”
Still, typical student behavior is to be expected; a student can fall asleep in a real class just as easily as his or her avatar can slump over, indicating that he or she is away from the computer. Instructors already accustomed to the real-life behavior of students seem prepared to accept it in-world.
“We see many things in a lecture hall with wireless when the students have laptops,” says Dr. Ed Lamoureax, who will be teaching an SL-only course during Bradley University’s three-week interim session in January 2007. “Students multitask now. It’s just a given.”
