Educational Frontiers: Learning in a Virtual World (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE CONNECT - 0 views
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With very little time and a lot of content to cover, one way to accomplish this change is to use game-based metaphors that capture students’ interest. But there is no need to actually create a game to leverage the concept of game-play for class activities. After all, class activities come with goals, feedback, rewards, and recognition, and these translate well in this visual, exploratory environment. The virtual world looks like a game setting and is one in which instructors can guide, observe, and provide feedback and rewards for class activities.
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Students worry that the class structure will be poorly defined and managed. A well-structured course includes a syllabus that defines the course objectives, learning objectives, goals, measurements, a schedule of activities and assignments, and rubrics for assessment. Virtual world courses add information on how projects will be delivered, how class discussions will be evaluated, and how students can benefit from feedback to improve the quality of their work throughout the course. Other benefits include discovering new ways to study, discuss, create, and express the course subject under the supervision and support of the instructor. In virtual worlds, the instructor’s role shifts from being the “sage on the stage” to being the domain expert—the authority who stimulates and supervises exploration while providing structure, guidance, feedback, and assessment. Demystifying complexity is not an easy task!
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Exams or assessments of competency shift to projects and solutions to problems that are expressed in context, offering new ways to visualize, experience, and assess the solutions. This method does not replace traditional methods of evaluation, but it does offers additional ways of assessing what students know and can apply. For example, CS 382, a software design class at Colorado Technical University (CTU), created a 3D game maze and populated it with traps, sensors, flags, a scoreboard, treasures, and other game features and then played the game on the last night of class. The goal of the class was to learn to model a variety of software designs using drawings in a design specification. The students exceeded the class requirements: they designed, prototyped, and tested their designs. They discovered a minor flaw, and one student fixed the problem while the class tested it during the next run of the game. These students were so immersed in the learning experience that they did not realize they had accomplished the goals of several classes in a single term. Virtual environments are stimulating, creative landscapes. When virtual worlds are populated with the right mix of content and discovery, students remain long after class ends.
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Reflections from someone who has taught several courses in Second Life about the teaching experience.
