Icarus Studios News

A New Twist on Online Education

Not long ago, when I was teaching at a local university, I had occasion to hold office hours online in the popular virtual world, Second Life. The class focused on exploring the role of the computer in contemporary society, so we looked at everything from questions of ethics to enabling technologies and the digital divide. It’s an exciting course for students because it challenges them to think critically about things they deal with in their everyday lives—things like digital rights, Web cookies, privacy issues, and so on. For the virtual office hours assignment, students were asked to explore the virtual world, experiment with various avatars, and interact with other, regular citizens of the world.

When I jumped into the virtual world and headed for my office hours site (located near a famous campus landmark on the university’s custom island), I had no idea what to expect from the students. Few had ever visited a virtual world before, and most were skeptical of possible benefits of the experience. While I can’t speak to what happened as they explored the open, uncensored virtual world—their experiences ran the gamut of everything from forming friendships to a case of mild harassment—I can say that the students’ participation and engagement in this project was amazing. When they came to my virtual office, we used the in-game chat to discuss their experiences and relate it to classroom topics, and the conversations were livelier than most anything I had experienced in traditional classrooms. Later, some students said that they felt both freer in the virtual environment, but also more pressured to speak. The virtual world gave them an anonymity that helped break down the stage fright that might keep some students silent in the classroom. However, that same anonymity made them feel like they needed to participate in order to make their presence known.

This group of students wasn’t terribly lively in the ordinary classroom, but I felt as though our online discussion enabled them to express good ideas that might otherwise have been suppressed. The usual Web-based class relies heavily on forums and e-mail for student-teacher communication, and lessons tend to be made available as Word documents or forum posts that students have to read and digest on their own. Virtual classrooms open up the possibilities of new modes of online teaching and distance learning. Icarus tools offer ways for instructors to add Web pages (as well as streaming video and audio) to their online environment. And, of course, the environment itself can become part of the learning experience: subjects ranging from architecture to world culture and everything in between could benefit from an environment where students can explore representations of the things they’re studying. My little brush with virtual world teaching barely scratched the surface of what learning can be in a virtual environment, but the student response made it clear to me that online education is ready to make a major leap forward.

(Continued in Part 2)

-Jason Cisarano, Virtual Worlds Team