Liberal Education Today

A Seton Hall instructional team presented on "Supporting Virtual Teams in Second Life: A Case Study" at the New Media Consortium 2006 regional conference, hosted by Trinity University.

The class was industrial and organizational psych. Pedagogical goals for using Second Life included increased student engagement, active use of student laptops, and group work pracitce. Instructional team consisted of an instructional designer and faculty member. They used Second Life twice, first as extra credit, then integrated into curriculum the following semester.

Technology challenges were considerable. Some students lacked broadband access. Some machines, including university-owned ones, had problematic graphics cards. Students experienced rez (image resolution) problems initially, while others ran into that over time (one hour into class). It was sometimes hard to move between machines, after problems, due to lost chat logs. Additionally, it was difficult to control student machine usage when it impinged on SL performance (i.e., running applications which fought for CPU or bandwidth). SL account problems transpired. Lastly, converting bitmap files (SL's default image saving) to JPEGs (used in the wiki platform) was an unanticipated issue. Overall, more tech preparation was required.

Pedagogical approaches: instructional team created a "cover story," where students are working for a PR firm. This drew together team work, creativity, and distributed group members. Time issues required arranging class time in order to allow minutes for initial activities, which users usually insist on doing (naming, appearance). Instructional team added several other applications to the mix, including a Blackboard class to store documents, and Blackboard wikis for collaboration

Within Second Life, notecards were issued containing introductory information. Some free objects were made available in order to build environmental engagement (example: tshirts). An outside speaker was brought in to talk about virtual teambuilding, partly within the "cover story" framework.

A second pedagogical framework, involved a scavenger hunt. Therein beginning and ending spaces were clearly identified.

Assessment covered diverse work. Students assembled multimedia materials in wikis. Grading included points for wiki work, survey completion, and team peer assessmebt

Results: the instructional team gathered data from the wiki, discussions, surveys, and observations. Informal discussions revealed that students viewed the class traditionally, seeing Second Life as too gamelike. Teambuilding generally succeeded.

Tags: nmc2006reg