Worlds of wisdom
Virtual worlds and serious games are beginning to find their place in education as tutors and students explore expanding learning opportunities.
Virtual worlds have been around for 20 years, but it is only in the past five years or so that the potential of exploring the serious uses of virtual worlds in education has been realised. Serious virtual worlds – essentially interactive environments that can be explored by many users at the same time – can help tutors transform the way knowledge is shared and how students are engaged. There is an opportunity to develop beyond the traditional mode of teacher and learner as students become a more central component in the use of immersive worlds, creating learning experiences for themselves and adopting a more exploratory mode of learning.
Take, for example, the success and wide reporting of Second Life. This online virtual world has more than 16 million active users. It has helped to highlight the wider use of immersive worlds for supporting a range of human activities and interactions, presenting a wealth of new opportunities for enriching how we learn, how we work and how we play.
In this way, Second Life, in common with other virtual world applications, has opened up the potential for users and learners, teachers and trainers, policy makers and decision makers to collaborate easily in immersive 3D environments. By means of an avatar – a computer user’s representation of him or herself – in the immersive space, the user can readily feel a sense of control within the environments and more easily engage with experiences as they unfold.
Web applications
The use of virtual environments has been facilitated greatly through web-based applications that allow a range of options, including sharing documents and files, holding meetings and events, networking and hosting virtual seminars and lectures, running research experiments, providing forums for sharing research findings and meeting international colleagues. These applications also have great potential for integrating different technologies to deliver social software applications, e-learning materials and content, and user games and narrative-based social interactions.
Simulations and immersive virtual worlds are useful in learning for two main reasons: their uptake by young users; and how they relate to the ways we learn. Recent work in gaming has shown that whole-brain activity occurs when learners are playing games, as opposed to limited activity when more traditional learning methods are used. The powerful nature of learning from doing and with others is maximised in simulation and game-based learning. We can also learn socially from watching others and replicating behaviours of those around us.
A major difficulty in embracing this revolution is knowing where to start and what will be useful. Second Life is the most pervasive example, but there are around 80 other environments and 100 new virtual worlds are expected to appear in 2009, many aimed at education and training. The shift to exploratory learning, with its greater capacity for modelling experiences, offers a challenge for teaching practitioners who rely on the traditional approach to transferring information from tutor to learner.
A major study by Coventry University’s Serious Games Institute and the Joint Information Systems Committee was carried out in 2008 to help practitioners identify the worlds that are most relevant for their particular learning context. The report presents an overview of the available virtual worlds, describing in particular those that have educational potential and could be valuable in schools and colleges.
Education and training
Social worlds, training worlds and corporate worlds have the most relevance for education and training, but the use of multi-player role play games may have real educational potential to support social learning in the longer term. We are also seeing the beginning of real applications for mirror worlds in the area of education and research, and anticipate new developments over the next five years.
While the use of immersive world applications is maturing in areas such as business and health training, there are still significant challenges that remain, such as a need for common standards and the validation of assessment and evaluation techniques. This presents the community of learners, tutors, institutional management, policy makers and developers with interesting problems when considering how to respond to the future of learning.
For example, if content in the future is generated more by learners than tutors, this will have an impact on the role of the tutor, as we have seen in online learning. However, it is through engagement with the new tools that tutors can begin to see how their skills should be best employed.
In short, the possibilities of games and virtual worlds are not an end in themselves; they are a starting point on a journey that will allow us to reconceptualise and rebuild our education system through realigning policies and institutions back to the learners and learning processes, while offering tutors a chance to create and choreograph immersive and engaging learning experiences with their students.
The journey we find ourselves on is both stimulating and exciting. Virtual worlds have the potential to inform and improve the quality of our learning experiences. For this reason alone, the power of immersive experiences may well have a transformative impact on education and our everyday lives.
Sara de Freitas is director of research at Coventry University’s Serious Games Institute