Do educators have a future in SL?

[Kayako Mayako]

I recently returned to Second Life to retrieve some of my early teaching content (after spending 12 years in OpenSim) and have been pleasantly surprised by numerous developments since my departure in 2010 (including the expansive use of more realistic mesh, the lovely new premium membership neighborhoods, voice morphing, 360-degree video capture, complete avatar changes built into the SL viewer, and more). 

As a decidedly negative finding, the amount of X-rated content in SL appears to have grown exponentially since 2010 (when the educator discount ended).  Accordingly, it occurs to me that SL may have done educators a favor (by ending the educator discount and saving us from continuing in a grid that includes so much adult entertainment). 

Still, I am curious about the “Marketing the Metaverse” section in the SL 2022 Roadmap.  That is, if SL plans to compete with other wannabe metaverses, isn’t a wider customer base (including educators and nonprofit entities) central to the most definitive metaverses (?).  Further, it seems like educators might have a few thoughts about an educational version of the proposed premium plus membership. 

What do you think – is there a chance SL may want to entice educators back OR is a continuation of the indifference towards educators a more likely scenario? 

[Mollymews]

a fyi

the Education and Non-Profit discount was restored in 2014

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Education_and_Non-Profit_Discount_Terms_and_Conditions

we need not see X-rated content.  The viewer and marketplace have search and access filters that by default put X-rated content behind the Adult wall. We have to ourselves enable the Adult filter

 

[Kayako Mayako]

@Mollymews Re:  "The education and non profit discount was restored in 2014," is it possible you are referring to "grandfathered" regions?  My understanding is that there is no [1/2 price] educator discount available now on new island purchases.  Rather, educators and non profits can purchase Homestead islands that are standalone (without having to first purchase a full region) but all other land purchases are at the same rate as all other SL residents.

Also, blocking/avoiding X-rated content is easy for instructors but bringing students into the grid would require special features like the pre-creation (and pre-placement) of student avatars on private islands.

 

[Sitearm Madonna]

@Kayako Mayako Welcome back! Contact Madori Linden or Elli Pinion regarding the Virtual Worlds Education Consortium and the new EduLand Area. Best Regards, Sitearm.

@Madori Linden

@Elli Pinion

[Coffee Pancake]

4 hours ago, Kayako Mayako said:

Also, blocking/avoiding X-rated content is easy for instructors but bringing students into the grid would require special features like the pre-creation (and pre-placement) of student avatars on private islands.

You misunderstand, Adult content is blocked for every account by default.

To see adult content, the age on file with LL must be >18 (DOB is entered during the account creation process), and the user must then enable adult content in the viewer.

Account holders under 18 are limited to G rated regions and marketplace content.

 

[Hunny Bunny]

No, I don't think educators have a future in SL. We have enough know-it-alls already.

[Coffee Pancake]

  

5 hours ago, Kayako Mayako said:

Still, I am curious about the “Marketing the Metaverse” section in the SL 2022 Roadmap.  That is, if SL plans to compete with other wannabe metaverses, isn’t a wider customer base (including educators and nonprofit entities) central to the most definitive metaverses (?).

To address this separately. 

It has taken LL almost 19 years and some huge costly mistakes to appreciate that the userbase for any virtual world style metaverse looks a lot like the userbase we have here now. There is not a hitherto untapped userbase of entirely different perfectly PG serious professional people who want to spend time and money in a virtual environment. Meta are just starting their journey to figure this out and desperately trying to talk up the size of their userbase.

LL's own Sansar was just such a virtual world for entirely different people and it struggled to maintain an online population greater than the number of employees working on it, this disparity was finally resolved following Sansar's sale by the new owners firing all the staff.

There are other virtual worlds, the ones with people are intensely focused on social activates with a side of playing house / dress up. The rest are either abandoned or crypto ponzi focused. 

As a general term, the metaverse, is not being used to exclusively describe virtual worlds or online hang outs, when it is used with that specific reference the overwhelming public response is negative, often referring to Second Life as something that crashed out in 2004.

 

As for education in Second Life, while it never stopped, it's never going to have the kind of standing academia might desire as academia doesn't pay the bills.  A private region and load of locked down student accounts is never going to approach the income from an equal number of regular users (irrespective of what activities they choose to participate in).

[Laylah Yaseotoko]

A colleague of mine at work goes to UCF they have a virtual presence here and do labs in world but he says they have their own client that only lets them interact with the UCF properties and none of the rest of SL they'd have to get the normal client and a personal account for that. At least that is what I understand. So I suppose educators have a future if they make themselves one.

[animats]

10 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

It has taken LL almost 19 years and some huge costly mistakes to appreciate that the userbase for any virtual world style metaverse looks a lot like the userbase we have here now. There is not a hitherto untapped userbase of entirely different perfectly PG serious professional people who want to spend time and money in a virtual environment. Meta are just starting their journey to figure this out and desperately trying to talk up the size of their userbase.

Reasonable. Although consider Roblox, which is for kid game developers and their players. Average user age 13, although Roblox has more adults than SL does, due to its sheer size of 5.7 million peak concurrent users. They're moving towards an SL-type technology or better, with mesh avatars and objects, and with user building tools. There may be a mass market product somewhere in this space. Maybe.

12 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

LL's own Sansar was just such a virtual world for entirely different people and it struggled to maintain an online population greater than the number of employees working on it, this disparity was finally resolved following Sansar's sale by the new owners firing all the staff.

Yes. The Sansar model was that creators would create spaces which ordinary users would then briefly visit. All-time high concurrent user count, from Steam, was around 260. Sansar is still turned on, although as of 7 minutes ago, it had zero logged in users. Daily average is 4.4. This is also the model for SineSpace, which has user counts in 2 digits. However, SineSpace repurposed their technology to make Breakroom, which is a more business-oriented version of Sinespace intended for meetings.

LL used to have Blocks World, their answer to Roblox. It, too, died a quiet death a few years ago.

Over in NFT land, Decentraland peaked around 2000 concurrent users. 1185 right now. Despite all the hype, not many people go there.

For those who don't know, SL's concurrent user count is in the 30,000-50,000 range, depending on time of day.

[animats]

On the education front, some of the problems are simply the ones that make meetings in SL a pain:

• Voice works badly. (Since LL acquired the spatial audio assets of High Fidelity, Vivox should be replaced at some point.)
• Presentations work badly. We need some kind of streaming facility so that you can show the same media screen to everybody in a room. This is possible now, but you have to set up a streaming server, which is a pain.
• Performance works badly. (The new performance viewers might help. Even now, if you have control over a region's assets, can limit your visitors' clothing complexity, and everybody has a good network connection, performance isn't a killer problem.)
• Onboarding works badly. The viewer is complicated.
• Group messaging works badly. Messages get lost.

Fixing those problems would help.

[Coffee Pancake]

Just now, animats said:

• Voice works badly. (Since LL acquired the spatial audio assets of High Fidelity, Vivox should be replaced at some point.)

Good spatial audio is an absolute must going forward. I have some hearing loss and find Linden meetings on voice a royal pain. The system we have right now makes it far harder than it could be.

Just now, animats said:

• Presentations work badly. We need some kind of streaming facility so that you can show the same media screen to everybody in a room. This is possible now, but you have to set up a streaming server, which is a pain.

It's not that hard to do with some prep, however it fails at the first hurdle. Why does this need to be wrapped in a virtual world.

Just now, animats said:

• Performance works badly. (The new performance viewers might help. Even now, if you have control over a region's assets, can limit your visitors' clothing complexity, and everybody has a good network connection, performance isn't a killer problem.)

If you're locking users down to educational regions and preventing them from general participation, performance wont be a worry. No one is going to the trouble (and considerable monetary & time investment) of fixing up a mesh avatar.

This also tanks any hopes LL might have of students getting a taste for SL in school and then joining for fun after. First impressions of system / starter avatar is not winning us anyone and we don't get a second chance.

Just now, animats said:

• Onboarding works badly. The viewer is complicated.

From a usability standpoint, it's no more complicated than any 3rd person video game, the difficultly comes in attempting to pilot an avatar using the skills developed gaming. SL does a lot of things just different enough to be plain wrong, but we're trapped with a userbase who wont adapt to SL adopting the common design language of gaming (mainly because the bulk of our users don't). Although, if SL ever hopes to have breakthrough growth, it MUST refactor interaction and usability in line with user expectations.

Just now, animats said:

• Group messaging works badly. Messages get lost.

Group messaging is a bust, chances are if something depends on this then an external group chat is in play and that likely offers all the features needed short of being able to individually move about in 3d space.

At which point the question gets asked, how important is the 3d space anyway? .. especially when in SL you can't be sure everyone has managed to coax their camera into the optimal position.

Could, should, this be done with a video instead?

How about if just the educator logged into SL and then streamed that to the group, either on a screen in person or via obs and literally any sufficiently sterile group chat, like MS teams (shudders).

[Alwin Alcott]

11 hours ago, Kayako Mayako said:

Do educators have a future in SL?

 

no

why log in into a, mostly, laggy world, with many limits and restrictions in usable things, for college/lessons
while zoom and other direct connections work in a more stable way, no avatars needed, no regions needed, and can show more and real instructions and presentations.
And keep also in mind, when voice is buggy the use of streaming isn't really a option, the delay between broadcast and receiver makes it unworkable for real time interaction.

[Kayako Mayako]

Thank you to everyone posting a reply!  More specifically, I appreciate all of the feedback, including the candid [not optimistic about educators ever returning en masse to SL] feedback!

[Lyr Lobo]

Sitearm Madonna kindly asked me to join this discussion of education in Second Life. I'm Lyr Lobo, the XR/VR faculty champion at Parker University in Dallas, Texas.

I joined Second Life in 2005 to teach classes for Colorado Technical University (CTU) and never left. I've taught two university classes for Saint Martin's University and featured virtual world examples in my classes at CCCOnline. 

For 17+ years, I taught 53 university classes that met and created projects in Second Life and three in OpenSim. My most recent class was in Fall 2021.

My research team designs games and educational simulations and we are bridging virtual worlds in our VR app, which is currently in testing. We will talk about it at the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education (VWBPE.org) conference March 31-April 2. 

Join us at the VWBPE conference by registering at VWBPE.org  which includes events, dances, presentations, and swag.

The program and schedule for the March 31-April 2 events are at https://www.vwbpe.org/conference/program

Education in virtual worlds and in Second Life is vibrant and we have a resilient community of universities and nonprofits supporting our work through classes, conferences, and events, but most of us are very busy, but rarely do I speak on these forums. 

Here is information on the Nonprofit Commons, Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable, and VWEC educational communities:

I'm Education co-Chair on the Nonprofit Commons Board and conduct research on virtual world education. 

Another educational group includes The Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable, which meets on Thursdays at Noon. The location is in the group and they post notices each week on topics. 

My co-Chair on the Education Committee is Rhiannon Chatnoir. She is our Nonprofit Commons Community Manager, my Education co-Chair, and the head of AvaCon, Inc. AvaCon is a nonprofit that provides education and nonprofit support in virtual worlds.

The Nonprofit Commons meets on Fridays at 8:30 am SLT and has for 14+ years. Our members represent universities, schools, and nonprofit organizations from around the world.

The VWEC Eduverse is an archipelago of nonprofit and educational communities that co-located their regions for easy access, many thanks to support from Linden Lab.

Some of our SL educational community members have prior arrangements that do not support moving our regions, so we have educational groups spread across the map.

Good luck in your quest to strengthen education in virtual spaces. 

[Kayako Mayako]

Hi Lyr - Kay M. here.  Thank you for joining the thread!

 

[IvyTechEngineer]

Back in 2020 I was looking for alternative ways students could present work and Second Life was the answer for me. It has been a wonderful experience for my students and me. I also wanted to create a virtual cleanroom that could be used by students and faculty. A cleanroom can be used to build electronics such as MEMS devices. I had gotten this idea by visiting Evergreen Island 3 (no defunct) and reading an article about teaching in SL - Engineering Education Island: Teaching Engineering in Virtual Worlds (University of Ulster) describe many ways a 3D environment could be used to teach virtual. 

I am hopeful that people will share what they have learned, the tools they have used and the methods that have worked. In engineering the possibilities seem endless but the knowledge required to build a virtual learning environment is daunting but exciting. To design, build and fix is at the core of engineering and I am excited to be a part of this effort...

[Love Zhaoying]

I'm reminded of a quote (from a different context), "the future is in the past".  But here, I mean maybe back in the "heyday" education was more of a focus in SL.

[Kayako Mayako]

@IvyTechEngineer - I am impressed you are able to teach students to use the SL platform for building (within the confines of a single semester).  The one student building project I attempted was a Free Trade Game (where each student was the president of their own mini island nation and received a random selection of "natural resources" to combine into a marketable product).  The object of the game -- that students quickly gleaned -- was the need to trade in order to grow the economy of their island nation.  Still, while I expected students to find the Free Trade Game to be the most engaging of the course-related simulations on offer, it turned out it took too much time to learn how to manipulate the objects provided (and this proved to be a "non starter" for students).  In contrast, the easy-to-use Vocabulary Flashcards and in-world lecture note slides were of greater interest to students.

Based on the above and other student feedback, my conclusions include:

• Students are only willing to use virtual world learning activities/simulations that support the exact content in the course deliverables;
• Pre-creating and pre-placing student avatars is an important time-saver for students; and
• A few students each semester abhor everything about virtual world learning/meet-ups (so voluntary virtual learning simulations work best).

@Love Zhaoying - I agree with you -- there are innumerable ways virtual learning simulations have been effectively used in the past in SL.  Still (and unfortunately), there just isn't much of a [educational] buzz in SL right now.  For example, while there are about 12 universities/schools listed on the Second Life Education directory, it looks like only a few of the listings are still in use.  Note:  Daniel Voyager -- who started in SL via the Teen Grid (that was discontinued in 2010) -- is the author of one of the blogs I periodically check.  In turn, I can't help wondering if the educational use (and even general use...) of virtual worlds/SL would have been higher if the SL Teen Grid and early special support for educators hadn't ended in 2010 (?).

[vanettda Lassard]

This thread is two years old, but wanted to add my experience and voice to the archive. 

In Dec 2005 I was asked by my college division chair to investigate/research pedagogical uses for SL that could be used/tested during the upcoming summer semester. I'm not sure why he chose me, but it fell into my lap and I said sure, why not? At the time I taught RL students how to use the Adobe Creative suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign.) I also taught History of Typography, a Drawing for Designers class, a Digital Illustration class and basic intro to 3D modeling. For the next four months I investigated SL and was impressed. (I set up my personal account April 2006). Although the college didn't use SL for summer semester, I was approved to introduce it to students as part of my course curriculum that fall (2006).  

Around this time I got involved in the University of Idaho's education sim with the idea of setting up a transfer program to their game design program. 

I set up 15 avatars with passwords that I controlled and shared with students. I encouraged them to explore the orientation areas on their own, but I also gave them a basic tutorial on SL inventory, moving, rezzing objects and basic prim modeling. I reminded them that I would be able to see where they went and to focus on the assignment. After a week of messing around, I taught and assigned the creation of regular textures, tiling textures, alpha textures and the creation of a simple SL object in the UofI sandbox using those textures. 

The whole experience was well received by the students and over the course of two years a few of them created their own private accounts and added me as a friend. I was ready to expand the use of SL and I gave a basic introduction to other instructors on how they could use media and virtual instruction over a wide geographic area to augment their classes. This proved to be difficult. The issue wasn't the students, it was attempting to get a tenured Phd professors to break out of their teaching rut and give it a try. 

By 2007-08 the intense media coverage of sex in SL distorted the overall picture and made admin nervous. To be truthful I was nervous as well. I bumped into students exploring (with their own avi's) and tried to explain that SL was like a trip to Vegas. If you are looking for breathtaking vistas you can find it here. If you want strip clubs and brothels you can find that too. To which one of my students said, "and what you do in Vegas stays in Vegas!" I smiled through cringed teeth. 

Ultimately I was asked to back it out of my curriculum which I did with a sigh of relief. 

To this day, when I go to a club or event (Like Liquid9 lounge), I wonder if one of my ex students are there living their own SL dreams and should I be embarrassed/worried by the ever-present adult content or conversations I have with strangers(?) It makes finger fiddling with Vegas slot machines while hoping for a payout a little more real.

Due to a spinal injury in 2015 I no longer teach. (Miss the students and instruction, but I DO NOT miss the academic politics). I illustrate children's books from my bed and from time to time build mesh items and live my best life in SL. What a long strange trip it has been.

Edited February 22 by vanettda Lassard

[Extrude Ragu]

What I don't understand is whenever I hear about education in SecondLife it's always a University trying to send students who already attend a real campus into the virtual world... why?

To me the whole point of Second Life is to provide a life we can't have in our first. The people who would really stand to benefit from education in the virtual world are the ones who never got the opportunity to study at a real university maybe because of disability, maybe because they are not lucky to live in a wealthy society.

It seems crazy to me that when it comes to education, the people educators seem to want to educate in the virtual world are those who already have access to education in the real world.

[Kayako Mayako]

@vanettda Lassard --  It is interesting to read about your education-focused journey in Second Life. I was similarly concerned about the adult content in-world the first time I had course-related simulations set-up on my academic unit’s islands in SL (circa 2008-2010). Still, at the time, a bigger barrier to student participation [in the online courses I was supplementing with virtual learning simulations] was the time and effort required to: create an avatar; complete the tutorials on the orientation island; and then navigate to our university’s islands. In addition, at the time, ALL online courses were asynchronous – so meet-ups in-world were impossible to arrange.

After supplementing my online teaching with various simulations on private [OpenSimulator] islands for ten years, during the pandemic I returned to SL and was positively wowed by the quality of the content and tutorials now available in SL. I have since moved my teaching simulations back to SL. We only allow students and faculty to access our academic islands and I supply “loaner” avatars to interested students. Further, I tell students to keep the loaner avatars on our islands (and supply students with instructions for how to create their own avatars if they want to explore other parts of SL -- in an effort to keep students away from the adult content in SL).

At the same time the use cases for virtual learning simulations have expanded in recent years, the impediments to the more wide-spread use of virtual world platforms have expanded too (!)…

• Over-scheduled college students simply do not have the time needed to download and learn about the viewer/how to navigate around a virtual space.
• Many college students use tablets or cell phones for their Internet surfing – so they are not able to use a browser-based viewer. [The new mobile viewer may address this impediment – if/when it becomes available to free account users.]
• Over-scheduled faculty simply do not have the time to learn how to help students navigate around a virtual space and further, find the prospect of learning how to create their own simulations too daunting.
• The pandemic created a new expectation in online courses – for at least two or more Zoom webinar sessions. In turn, the availability of webinar sessions has resulted in less student interest in my courses in venturing in-world. In other words, the [virtual] campus space affordance of university-sponsored islands in SL appears to have been supplanted by Zoom webinars.
• SL beats VR headset applications when it comes to the incredibly useful (and expansive) in-world building tools BUT VR headset applications are the “IT” technology that everyone wants to say they use.

Again, while I remain aware of all of the adult content in SL, it seems to be manageable (via loaner avatars for students that are supposed to be kept on a "not available to the public" island). Still, I may re-focus on the question of the adult content in SL IF student participation levels increase. In the meantime, I find myself more focused on the list of impediments above.

-- Kayako Mayako

@Extrude Ragu -- I use virtual learning simulations in completely online courses that are part of completely online degree programs. In turn, while the students in my courses DO have access to our physical campus, many/most of my students live outside of the commuting range for the physical campus. Accordingly, a virtual campus does [potentially] add to the experience of online students.

Also, when it comes to on-ground courses, virtual learning simulations offer some unique affordances that are not available in traditional course materials. For example, mathematical game theory applications like the "chicken game" or "prisoners' dilemma" can be demonstrated in ways that would be too dangerous/costly to stage in real life.

-- Kayako Mayako

Edited February 25 by Kayako Mayako

[vanettda Lassard]

On 2/24/2024 at 11:50 AM, Extrude Ragu said:

What I don't understand is whenever I hear about education in SecondLife it's always a University trying to send students who already attend a real campus into the virtual world... why?

To me the whole point of Second Life is to provide a life we can't have in our first. The people who would really stand to benefit from education in the virtual world are the ones who never got the opportunity to study at a real university maybe because of disability, maybe because they are not lucky to live in a wealthy society.

It seems crazy to me that when it comes to education, the people educators seem to want to educate in the virtual world are those who already have access to education in the real world.

I wouldn't say "always." Although there is a benefit to providing existing on-campus students accessibly like tying together multiple satellite campuses (courses, teachers -- like the State University of New York--SUNY)  there is also an insurance liability with conducting after hours classes on a dark campus with vastly a reduced student presence and security. On top of that virtual classes have a lower facility overhead and gives colleges a broader base of adjunct professors.

As you said, There are many reasons for a virtual solution. The main reason are accessibility and cash. A vast ocean of potential students would like to go to college, but can't because of day work, kids, distance, or physical disabilities. Also, from the college POV, remote classes increases the schools bottom line. More students mean more tuition. 

Colleges want to educate and provide flexibility to those who already have access, as well as those who don't, as well as those who might start or even better, finish degrees that were left because of life. In 2006 remote education was in its infancy. Technology for such classes wasn't up to speed and to tell the truth there were psychological resistance from schools whose "identity" was locked to a brick and mortar experience. Covid lit a fire for educators to find remote solutions quickly. With current technology similar to zoom I'm unsure that virtual avatar simulations are still relevant, but I'm positive that remote education solutions for all is here to stay. 

[vanettda Lassard]

10 hours ago, Kayako Mayako said:

• Over-scheduled college students simply do not have the time needed to download and learn about the viewer/how to navigate around a virtual space.
• Many college students use tablets or cell phones for their Internet surfing – so they are not able to use a browser-based viewer. [The new mobile viewer may address this impediment – if/when it becomes available to free account users.]
• Over-scheduled faculty simply do not have the time to learn how to help students navigate around a virtual space and further, find the prospect of learning how to create their own simulations too daunting.
• The pandemic created a new expectation in online courses – for at least two or more Zoom webinar sessions. In turn, the availability of webinar sessions has resulted in less student interest in my courses in venturing in-world. In other words, the [virtual] campus space affordance of university-sponsored islands in SL appears to have been supplanted by Zoom webinars.
• SL beats VR headset applications when it comes to the incredibly useful (and expansive) in-world building tools BUT VR headset applications are the “IT” technology that everyone wants to say they use.

I think you nailed it on the head. I wish you all the best in your current instructional endeavors!

[PheebyKatz]

Honestly, I think the future of education is wherever those seeking to learn can find it.

As it has always been.

Trying to find a place for something to have a future is like having to host weekly revival meetings to keep something alive. There is no future in that.

Finding ways to spread knowledge that can't be corralled into potential dead ends (like universities, etc) is probably better.

Maybe take up writing comics. At least people will always like comics.