Loyalist College, one of Canada's first higher education institutions to launch a campus within Second Life, has now leveraged its expertise to launch a new virtual design centre. With a growing reputation in cyberspace for virtual design, the college is about to launch the Virtual Worlds Design Centre @ Loyalist College to promote its expertise and support to assist other institutions in developing their virtual presence.

The design centre has been planned in response to many requests to offer their design services and assistance in setting up space, projects and other activities 'in-world'. Ken Hudson, Loyalist's Manager of Academic and New Media Services and go-to person for all of the college's Second Life (SL) activities, has hired several students from a variety of Loyalist's creative media programs to work on his team.

Under Hudson's creative direction, the new department has so far been involved with a considerable number of collaborations with other institutions. One such collaboration was with students from Brown University in the U.S. by lending space and assisting in the building of a gallery for an art project. Loyalist also shared training materials to assist the U.S. State Department in a public diplomacy event to prepare Polish students for Second Life.

Loyalist campus also hosted officers from the Canadian Defence Academy to present information on using virtual worlds for training; Hudson's design team created a mock-up of a forces base and uniforms which the Academy continues to use in presenting SL internally. Finally, the department is also creating uniforms for members of the U.S. Parks Service at Alcatraz, California.

Beginning this term is the creation of a Youth Detention Facility Simulation, a 12-person detention centre to be used by some of Loyalist's courses for role-playing situations. Also in development with faculty is the Podcast Cinema, a venue where students will be able to select and watch Loyalist tutorials and course content in podcast format.

"Clearly, education and the way we deliver content is about to change in significant ways," says Hudson. "Becoming involved in Second Life gave Loyalist a glimpse into the near future and the revolution that is about to happen with the ready application of virtual worlds to education."

"Virtual worlds are innate learning worlds," he says. "They should be approached as an extension of the classroom to enhance the learning experience and augment course material."

Hudson should know. Loyalist was recently announced the winner of the Colleges Ontario 2008 Award for Innovation for its activities in SL and for being the first Canadian postsecondary institution to have a campus in a virtual world.

Since we last reported on the college's activities in Second Life almost a year ago, Loyalist has stepped up its experiments in the virtual world.

The Belleville, Ontario college has moved its virtual campus from the shared Edu Island to an island of their own. It was created to handle the growing interest for projects from within the college. The island houses not only the college campus, the hub of Loyalist's educational activities, but also a village complete with shops, cafe, cinema and art gallery.

As for 'in-world' learning, Loyalist's first foray into SL was with a journalism course taught by faculty member, Rob Washburn, who had guest journalists, researchers and editors join the virtual class. One of his students even garnered an internship with the Second Life News Network.

Since then, more faculty members have led their students into SL. This term, Phil Howlett, Academic Coordinator of the Community and Justice Services program, will lead a group of students for the first time into SL as part of his "Safe and Secure Environments" course to explore workplace simulations in a more unpredictable, yet safe, environment.

"No matter how 'realistic' a role-play in the classroom seems," says Howlett, "the students rarely get to experience the visceral reaction that we hope to create with the SL environment."

It is ironic that simulations in virtual worlds can offer a realism that students do not encounter in the physical classroom among their peers and professors. Entering a virtual world presents the opportunity to put students in real-life situations that would otherwise be too costly or too dangerous. "Anything that happens in a real-life facility can be recreated in SL, including drugs, weapons, and violence," says Howlett.

Lorne Thompson, Coordinator of the Child and Youth Worker program, also decided SL would be an interactive and different way to approach the delivery of his course content. He had students in his "Interpersonal and Group Dynamics" course work in groups to complete leadership tasks. "SL allowed me to observe 40 students completing their tasks, which would have been impossible for the same number of students to complete in a real-life environment," he says.

Learning in virtual worlds is not just for web-savvy and gaming types, either. Thompson says most of his students have enjoyed their SL experience. "This is significant considering that most of my students tend not to be interested so much in computers and gaming as they are in working with people," he explains.

Thompson's class also took part in an educational exercise with Information Management students at the University of Sheffield in England. Thompson responded to a call for student volunteers with whom to practice their interview skills and gain information about their activities 'in-world'. "I believe the experience helped them to begin to grasp just how international SL can be," he said.

"We found that once students were confident in SL... the whole experience generated a massive amount of enthusiasm," said Hudson about general student feedback so far. "Classroom experiences have revealed very positive outcomes in terms of peer-to-peer learning, speed and efficiency in completing exercises, and a rapid grasping of concepts taught in virtual worlds."

To other teachers and faculty considering the educational value of SL, Ken Hudson assures that it is a very accessible platform to facilitate experiential and collaborative learning. "My advice is to use it to augment a part of your curriculum that would be best served as an activity. Start small with a highly organized project with modest objectives and expectations."

Find a host of resources for educators, by the makers of Second Life, here: www.simteach.com.


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