DE Oracle @ UMUC

Taking Students on a Magical Mystery Virtual Tour

Irena Bojanova

Program Director TLMN

Graduate School of Management and Technology

Published: July-August 2010

Category: » Online-pedagogy » Teaching-strategies

Introduction

Field trips to different venues provide a rich and engaging learning experience for students. However, this is difficult—if not impossible—to accomplish for online classes. During the past several semesters, virtual tours were organized for UMUC graduate students attending ITEC 610 (Information Technology Foundations) and ITEC 620 (Information Technology Infrastructure) classes. The objectives of the tours were to provide a novel perspective on how data and information can be delivered, demonstrate how emerging technologies can support learning, and engage in interactive virtual demonstrations and simulations on emerging information technologies in support of course objectives.

Students were required to establish accounts for the applications to be used, review appropriate tutorials, understand policies and procedure, and create personifications of themselves in the form of avatars in Second Life. The details of the tours and their related components are explained below.

Virtual World Visits in Second Life

During the fall 2009 semester, the students in the form of avatars visited four virtual educational sites: IBM, Cisco, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and Siemens.  

The students met at the fountain plaza of the IBM Systems Technology Island (Figure 1). At the IBM Server Tower, they were able to watch educational sessions about the System Z10 mainframe, the Power 595 processor, and the IBM blade server center. The interactive environment allowed them to open the doors of a mainframe computer and explore its parts. The students also had complimentary espressos and lattes, and they used the comfortable chairs and sofas to relax.

The next tour location was the Cisco Live conference (Figure 2), an education and training event for IT, networking, and communications professionals. In 2009, this event was held both in real life in San Francisco and in Second Life. During the virtual tour, the students watched the conference keynotes and highlights; the panel discussions on sensor networks and education in virtual worlds; and experts' technical chats on wide area network services, products for the remote workforce, and secure unified communications. On the way back, the group visited the gift center for wizard hats and boxed gifts.

Next, the students teleported to the NOAA Island (Figure 3), which features simulations and activities related to the agency's roles and responsibilities. The students flew above a real-time weather map, hung on to an ascending weather balloon, observed the life cycle of a glacier in a time-lapse simulation, and experienced the devastating power of a tsunami as it hit a beach.

The final stop of the tour was at the Siemens Innovation Center. Siemens is Europe's largest engineering conglomerate which focuses on manufacturing, energy, and healthcare, and its Second Life center features innovations in each of these areas. The students experienced designing and creating rocket-propelled scooters that their avatars were able to fly in the air.

During the spring 2010 semester, students visited Sun Microsystems, IBM, the U.S. Military Veterans Center, and Genome Island. The students teleported to the Sun Microsystems Public Sim Island, where they were introduced to the Evolving Data Center. The dynamic interactive exhibit shows the migration of a legacy data center to one built on future technologies supporting energy efficiency (Figure 4).

The next stop was the IBM Systems EduCenter and the BladeCenter Serviceability Pavilion. Through virtual interactive simulations, the students were able to learn how to add a blade to an IBM BladeCenter and how to replace a faulty dual in-line memory module in an IBM BladeCenter S Chassis Server (Figure 5).

The students were subsequently teleported to the U.S. Military Veterans Center, a virtual center for American veterans, their families, and supporters, providing links to veterans' information and benefits. At this site, the students experienced a novel skydiving adventure.

At the end, the tour group enjoyed a scavenger hunt on Genome Island, constructed by Texas Wesleyan University. Although designed to support genetics classes for biology students, Genome Island is open for anyone to experience its many activities. Among the places visited was the Gene Tower, which includes informative 3D displays on genes, chromosomes, and DNA strands.

Web 2.0 Tools: Twitter and Twibes

During the tours, two related Web 2.0 tools (Figure 6) were used to capture student experiences in real time. The first, Twitter, is a social media service for transmitting and receiving short messages called tweets. The second, Twibes, is a tool that allows posting tweets in a common thread called a twibe. The tour guides also utilized the twibe to identify students with technical issues or who were lost between teleports and visited locations.

Cloud Computing with Google Docs

After the tour, Google Docs was used to compile students' reflections within a collaborative online environment. A PowerPoint-like presentation document was created in Google Docs and, after the tour, students were invited to collaborate on providing content for the presentation (Figure 7). Each student was able to contribute pictures taken from the Second Life visits in addition to posting their notes and conclusions. The contributions were posted in chronological order following those of other tourmates.

Links to the tour guidelines, twibes, presentations, and demo recordings are provided in the resources section at the end of this article.

Recommended Teaching Strategies

Valuable experiences and lessons learned have been gained from this virtual tour activity which translates to the following recommended teaching strategies covering each of the three tour phases.

Preparation

• Select tour sites based on educational value and interactive activities. The locations have to be directly relevant to the course material and yet be interactive and engaging. 
• Prepare clearly written activity tutorials. A navigation guide helps students explore Second Life sites that often do not have clear maps or guideposts.
• Check hardware requirements. Second Life requires use of a recently manufactured computer with a relatively powerful graphics card. Students with older computers and less powerful laptops (such as netbooks) will experience accessibility issues.
• Access to appropriate computer platforms must be provided to the students.
• Ensure that students are prepared for the activity. The start of an actual virtual tour is not the time for students to do account setups or avatar design, nor to check audio and video functionality or provide registration information. These preparations have to be made before the actual activity starts if the focus is to be on the learning experiences.
• Provide a global perspective. During a virtual tour, students can interact with avatars from other countries and visit sites owned by foreign entities. These experiences provide broad exposure to foreign concepts and ideas and establish international collaborative opportunities.

Activity

• Assign multiple activity facilitators. Some students can be laggards, others aggressive explorers; some experience technical issues, others engage in unacceptable behavior. The activity facilitators, who typically are faculty members, must closely monitor the students. As a rule of thumb, at least one active “avatar herder” is required for every 12 students.
• Use proper tools for communication. Avatars can communicate in Second Life through text-based chat or by microphone. The latter approach was found to be much more efficient even though it requires additional hardware.
• Monitor the time. Virtual tours and colloquia are scheduled to last one hour However, the tours can last up to two hours if not managed well. Students become easily engrossed in the virtual environment and the fascinating tour sites. Facilitators have to know when and how to put an end to an activity.

Post-Activity

• Provide a reflective assignment. It is important, after the virtual activity, to reinforce the connection between the learning experience and the course content. One way to achieve this is through reflective assignments, which document highlights of the activities and measure the level of learning gained by the students.
• Integrate the experience with the rest of the course activities. Encourage faculty to reference the activity during subsequent lessons, conduct follow-up class discussion sessions, and include questions about the activity in quizzes and examinations.

Conclusions

The integration of virtual worlds, Web 2.0, and cloud computing technologies can provide a rich extension to the current educational platform. In a virtual world such as Second Life, students can explore educational sites, participate in interactive demonstrations and simulations, and attend informative virtual meetings and conferences. Web 2.0 tools such as Twitter and Twibes can be incorporated to further support collaboration and information exchange as well as enhance the sense of participating in a shared learning experience. Google Docs is an example of an online cloud-based office suite that enables users to create, collaboratively review and edit, and store documents and presentations completely online, prior to posting final assignments in WebTycho.

All virtual tour activities for supported the pedagogical objectives of being engaging, interactive, and reflective. A definite improvement in students' satisfaction was achieved, representing a significant improvement over the use of traditional learning management systems, 2D video clips, and presentation slides. The students enjoyed their experiences and wanted to return and discover more engaging sites. Both students and faculty find the activities highly valuable, thus supporting continued use.

The above conclusions are supported by a comprehensive student survey conducted after each of the tours. Results are shown in the table below:

Future plans for the ITEC virtual tours include exploring new and exciting virtual sites that are relevant to today's dynamic world, searching for promising new applications and technologies, identifying innovative approaches to support virtual group activities, addressing technical and human pitfalls, identifying efficient tools for recording virtual tours, and further developing the demonstrated ideas on combining emerging technologies for enhancing teaching and learning.

Resources

• ITEC Virtual Learning Tours: Links to guidelines, Twibes, presentations, and demo recordings (http://polaris.umuc.edu/~ibojanov/Demos/Virtual Tours)
• Google Docs (http://docs.google.com)
• Second Life (http://secondlife.com)
• Second Life System Requirements (http://secondlife.com/support/system-requirements)
• Twibes (http://www.twibes.com)
• Twitter (http://twitter.com)