Online Higher Education in Second Life?

XxtraLarGe asks: "As both a technician for my college's Distance Learning program and as an avid gamer, I have been tasked with investigating Second Life as a possible way for us to extend and enhance our online classes. I've done a lot of research, reading about what other schools have done. While I personally think it is a really cool idea, I am somewhat skeptical of the actual practicality and value of what seems to be a glorified chat room. I'd like to hear from others about their education experience in Second Life, particularly if you've been involved in setting up any online classes or taken any online classes. What sort of training would be required for the faculty, and is it really worth it?"

Does your school want to be taken seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

if so, consider the fact that you guys will look like total boners if you offer classes in a video game. I don't care if that sounds ok to you, accept that you're weird and think how it's going to sound to anyone who is in a position to hire anyone for a real job.

My god

[bobetov]

Ok, so Second Life is cool. It's waaaay trendy. It has the sexy.

But it is chat. Only chat. Chat that you can't archive, that is done with word bubbles, and without a moderation system. What on earth would make you think that this would be a good platform for instruction?

Additionally:
- It's a beast on the requirements side, you need a ton of 3D horsepower and a fat network pipe to use it effectively
- Large groups of avatars clustered together hammer the client, turning things into a 4fps slideshow
- Server uptime has historically not been stellar, though that may have changed since I was involved
- It's distracting as all hell - your students will spend all their time customizing/scoping out each others' avatars

Please, for the love of pete, get over the hype on Second Life.

Re:Does your school want to be taken seriously?

[Seumas]

I have to agree. From what I have seen of Second Life, that and "higher education" do not belong in the same sentence. Second Life is where the people who are too retarded for other games go to "play".

Seriously, I tried to play it once and within five minutes of creating a character I had one female avatar offer to go offline and have "sex via instant messaging" for cash and another try to sell me some random crap that I didn't have a clue about. Needless to say, I deleted the game and never played again. Not to mention, the graphics and interface were not all that appealing.

I'm not a big fan of MMOs as they tend to be incredibly tedious and repetitive and pointless, but Second Life seemed to take that to the extreme. How about instead of offering higher education in some idiotic virtual chat room, people can just log into a website and watch videos or listen to lectures and participate that way? Or even better... they could actually go to an actual school for an actual education.

Or maybe I'm just stupid.

But not stupid enough to waste my first life playing Second Life.

Overhyped

[tsa]

SL is so extremely overhyped right now it seems like the new Internet of the late 1990s. People even have conference chats in there, and now we need to have schools in there as well? Get a grip guys, and focus on the quality and results of your work. Doing your work in a new and cool way isn't always better you know. The only ones who will profit from the hype is the Linden 'family'.

Re:And what if...

[Moraelin]

And what if it is a school for videogaming? (Programming and Animation in particular, such schools exist).

I can't see how having the school _in_ a video game would help with either. You could use a video game as an illustration or assignment, maybe, but having virtual avatars dicking around in a virtual world? Seriously, how's that going to help?

So I wouldn't be turned off just because a student learned through a game (a top freshman or sophomore Naval pilot trained on a Microsoft's Flight Simulator a few years back to win Naval contest that only juniors and seniors won before... can't seem to find the story right now). I remember also a Discovery Channel special where they showed surgeons being trained on a video game.

Except those are very specialized simulators, extremely close to the real thing. I can't see how playing any game would help programming in the same way. If you play MS Flight Sim, you might actually learn something about airplanes, but if you click around a virtual classroom in Second Life, all you've learned from there is to click around in a game. Maybe a valuable skill for something else, but it won't make you a better programmer no matter how you want to slice it.

Additionally, SL does have the dubious reputation among many people of being basically a 3D cybersex game, and of pink flying penises. Deserved or undeserved, I'm not discussing that at this point. Just that it has it. So while many employers could maybe live with getting your courses online, many _will_ be turned off by such an association. It's basically on par with saying that you got your education at the local brothel. You know, one of the hookers also was good with computers and stuff.

OTOH, the worst classes I have ever taken were online classes. Impersonal, the teacher (in English anyways) seems to grade papers harsher without a face to put to it, lacking in clarification or time the teacher can devote to your question, and all around sucky for areas you aren't naturally good in. No social interaction, etc.

I'm not sure putting a silly avatar on it would help that horribly much. Or not enough to offset the other problems.

So I would ask: does this make sense and how exactly will it help students? Is this just eye candy? Will it put up barriers for education? (I know nothing about 2nd life - Windows Only? Does it require too high end of a computer to run comfortabley?) Make that a consideration. Is the professor going to struggle with this? Could this money be spent in a better way or would it be better not to spend it at all? Is it easy? When your semesters are only 14-15 weeks, you don't want to dick around for a week or two getting things running on either side. Does it or doesn't it make sense? It should be really that simple.

I'm guessing it would take a lot more than a week or two, including dealing with disruptions, pranks and whatnot. The pink flying penises aren't just a wisecrack, that's just what happened to someone's press release in SL.

Plus, I see it as more work for the teacher all semester long, if they actually want to simulate all the advantages of a real school. Just seeing the teacher standing there isn't going to do much.

Re:My god

[DaleGlass]

If I met someone who acquired their education via Second Life, I would laugh hysterically at them. Then I would toss my spare change into their tin can and while I continue on my way to work.

So what exactly would make you feel so superior? I would hope that the prestige of one's education is based on its quality, rather than on where you got it.

Here in Spain we have the UNED, a distance university. I think it's the spanish university with the highest number of students. You can pretty much study everything at home, although newsgroups and forums are available. By your logic, acquiring an education in USENET and web boards must be really funny as well.

If they decided to open a place in SL, it wouldn't stop being what it currently is, would it? The exam certainly wouldn't get any easier. While I have my doubts regarding whether SL would be an improvement over forums, I think such a thing could be tried quite successfully.

SL Still Only Half Baked

[blueZhift]

In itself having online classes in a 3D virtual setting like Second Life is a good idea. It is surprising just how much more of a connection seeing and interacting with others in such a manner brings compared to text only. Integrated voice should serve to deepen the immersion and effectiveness of using SL as an online education platform. The real problem though, is that Second Life is not quite up to the task yet and the kind of hardware that students would need to run it well is not that widespread yet.

The hardware issue makes me think that while Second Life is not, strictly speaking, a game, it would be a good idea to create an optimized client for game consoles like the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3. These two consoles have the raw computational power and graphics capabilities that should make for a smoother in world experience. Plus, game consoles are standardized platforms that are widespread and easier to support than PCs at lower cost to the user. Sony's virtual world project Home (beta soon [homebetatrial.com]), may point the way for Second Life on a console.

In a lot of ways, Second Life is glorified chat. But don't forget, in the early days, AOL made a lot of money off of mere chat. And now chat and online forums, etc. are being used effectively for online instruction. So it's just a matter of time and technology before many of us will be taking our seats in a 3D virtual classroom, hopefully free of flying male anatomy!