This is the sort of thing which would have some of the free spirits who thrive in the relatively anarchic and regulation-free virtual worlds emerging on the Internet up in arms. However as our institution puts more of its learning activities into environments such as Second Life there are many policy issues emerging to which we’re having to find solutions.

I had an interesting conversation earlier today with Anna Peachey, our resident Second Life guru about some of these issues. I had only encountered her before in Second Life so it was great to meet Elsa Dickins’ real life avatar.

One of the most fundamental issues is whether Second Life is the best environment for us to base our activities in - with substantial investment going into a platform we don’t control. If Woodbury University could have its site removed by Linden Labs then it could happen to us for a variety of reasons. There are alternative environments such as OpenSim which can be hosted and managed in-house and avoid the problem of the site being withdrawn.

This parallels the arguments surrounding the use of free Web 2.0 tools on the internet versus in-house VLEs/LMSs, some of which I’ve detailed before. Trying to replicate the success of Second Life in a locally-hosted “walled garden” would have a number of drawbacks. By restricting the space to students and staff of a single university it would miss that element of spontanaeity and unpredictability that having strangers wander into your tutorials brings! But would students take to a neater, more sanitised version of Second Life? On the other hand the Open University has enough critical mass with its 200,000 learners that it could potentially attract thousands of them to an environment restricted to its own community where genuinely useful learning activities were taking place.

Another issue to get to grips with is the basic architecture of the University’s islands. Schomebase is where students tend to hang out and can create their own objects whereas OpenLife’s spaces are developed and controlled by University staff. We’re not convinced we’ve got this balance right yet and there are various sections of the islands which need to be restricted at times or permanently for particular purposes (eg meeting rooms where there are good reasons for keeping the discussions private).

As more activities take place on Second Life there will no doubt be great controversies about where they should be located relative to each other. Deciding whether an entirely new area of activity such as study skills should have its own island or say a building within an existing island is something that will have to be worked out. I remember similar discussions a decade ago when universities were trying to decide on the optimum architectures for their new institutional websites.

There are of course various legal issues to deal with such as copyright. Another one is ensuring that we don’t breach access restrictions to any library content we make available there. Then there will inevitably be complaints from students about the behaviour of other students - we need to work out ways of dealing with those.

Training is an issue too. If we’re going to be hosting core parts of our courses in virtual worlds, we need to provide training for students and tutors in technical and navigational issues - and also guidance to staff and learners in how to carry out effective teaching and learning activities “in world”. I heard about a student the other day who fell down into the tunnel at the edge of one of our common areas and spent the whole tutorial trying to find his away out of it to join the other students…

There are all sorts of logistical issues too such as the connections between the virtual world and the virtual learning environment, single sign-on, automated population of tutor groups with the right students and booking systems for teaching spaces within Second Life, integration of your avatar into your student profile, bespoke sign-ups which allow you to enter the virtual world immediately… Thank you Anna/Elsa for giving me a lot more very interesting things to think about!

Socialisation is generally considered to be a necessary or at least useful precursor to effective participation in online classes. It forms stage 2 in Gilly Salmon’s widely applied five-stage model. I’ve been thinking about this since I asked her in, I think, 2000 if she thought online classes ran better if the people had met physically beforehand. A lot of educators assume that to be the case. Gilly was adamant that it was better that students who would be working with each other online did not meet up in advance; any negative impressions gained face to face could harm later online interaction.

I’ve never been entirely convinced of this, and have been reflecting on the vital role of socialisation for many of our students after spending a week in August at the OU Residential School in Santiago de Compostela (students pictured here are on a fact-finding mission around the city, where socialising is a by-product of the learning activity). The intense interactions between students and with staff over the week, let alone the huge amount of learning that took place, were clearly very beneficial for the great majority of participants. I had the impression that because contact with other students was so rare, the experience meant much more to them than it would have for campus-based students.

Of course the World has changed hugely since 2000 and most of us are much more comfortable now with online socialising, developing varying degrees of addiction to email, Facebook or Twitter. That socialisation phase may be less necessary for students now much more comfortable with the technologies. Shailey Minocha has been researching education in Second Life and told me this morning that she finds students resent online socialisation activities unless they are clearly connected to the course content or learning outcomes. She reported on a tutor who found the same in face-to-face settings: busy students who have travelled to a tutorial want to get stuck into the content immediately. They’re more inclined to socialise at the end of the class when they feel they’ve got what they wanted out of it.

Perhaps the conclusion from all this is that we’re all so short of time that we don’t necessarily realise how important the social element is to working or studying effectively with others. If we want our students to have opportunities for socialisation so that their relationships are more productive, we have to be clever about the way we design those experiences. Many take up the chance for unstructured social contact with others anyway and benefit immensely from chatting to others in residential schools, tutorials, online forums, videoconferencing and Second Life.

Physical presence may result in better long-term relationships with a positive impact on learning, motivation and progression; some students may be able to achieve the same through online interaction. What is becoming clear is that any socialisation activities perceived as having no direct learning outcomes relevant to the assessment are likely to be considered by students a waste of time!

Cath Wilkins, an Open University Associate Lecturer among her other jobs, gave an interesting presentation this morning at the Teaching Mathematics with Online Tutorials conference. I’ve reported before on the Elluminate maths trials at the OU. She teaches on the OU MSc Programme which has 500 students actively studying on it and is probably the biggest online maths masters in the World.

Cath books two hour slots for online maths tutorials using Elluminate - the first half hour to get people familiarised with the system and to chat followed by an hour’s lecture during which she makes heavy use of the whiteboard to explain the maths. In the last few minutes students carry on chatting or trying out the whiteboard. Most students don’t use their microphones but find the chat very helpful. Cath describes her six steps for a successful e-tutorial:

1. Book the room and brief the students - she sends them a link to the Elluminate support page, and that seems sufficient.
2. Write the talk and save it as an overlaid pdf file - not being used to preparing powerpoint presentations this took her a lot of time. The presentations were saved as pdfs and converted into jpgs to place in Elluminate.
3. Practice in the vRoom - this is the free area Elluminate provides for people to try the product out with a maximum of three participants.
4. Do the tutorial - including using the file transfer facility at the end to send through files.
5. Get feedback from students via an online questionnaire.
6. Make the URL of the recording available for students who didn’t attend or want to experience aspects of the tutorial again.

So how did the thirty out of her sixty students who took up the offer of an online tutorial find the experience. Cath received the following comments from students:

“The OU MSc lacks any ‘communal’ element and this goes some way towards providing that.” - nearly all the students mentioned the community aspects which these etutorials help to facilitate.

“Mathematics comes alive when you hear it being spoken out loud, and the process on Elluminate is just as clear as in a face-to-face tutorial.” - Cath thought this was going a bit far but clearly here was one satisfied customer.

“Not having a microphone wasn’t a problem as I could type any questions I had.” - even those students who had microphones tended to use chat to communicate instead.

“It was nice to send little messages to each other.” - they really enjoyed this aspect, didn’t abuse it, or seem to get too distracted by it.

“The system was easy to use, although a bit cumbersome to set up.” - this comment came from someone whose version of Java was incompatible initially. No-one else out of the 30 students (divided into two sub-groups) had installation problems.

“The eTutorials focussed my studies and my mind on the important aspects of the course” - clearly another satisfied customer, and maybe a key reason for having tutorials: helping students to see the wood for the trees.

Cath concluded by listing her pros and cons of teaching using Elluminate:

1. It’s an effective way to teach
2. It’s recorded for later use
3. Very little training is needed for tutor or students
4. It’s a good solution if students are geographically spread out
5. There are few technical glitches - though she got logged out a few times
6. It’s better than nothing - there were no opportunities to interact with the students before Elluminate started being used

On the downside she finds that there is a lower level of feedback from students compared to f2f teaching, despite the use of questions, ticks, crosses and emoticons. And she had to think on her feet a lot - it was not easy to put up detailed maths at short notice. Final verdict: “Exhausting but exhilarating”.

At the Cottenham event last week there was a talk by Andrew Field who achieved the most amazing level of audience engagement I’ve seen in years. His philosophy is to trick students into learning by getting them to play online games, improving their minds in the process without even realising it’s happening.

Field certainly achieved this with an adult audience by having us answer multiple choice questions in teams. If you got the answer right you got the chance to try to score a goal in a flash animation against a goalie with the face of a famous figure such as Thatcher or Mandela.

Field thinks Moodle and VLEs are fundamentally boring. He’s right - they’re just tedious empty shells until interesting content and activities are included in them. One online activity his schoolkids love is to get an animation of the teacher to walk the plank by answering questions correctly. Every correct question means a walk further forward until the teacher falls into the sea - to the delight of the pupils.

He also showed a version of space invaders called “teacher invaders” where you have 30 seconds to try to get the question right and prove that the evil teachers who say you haven’t got any knowledge are wrong…

Infectiously enthusiastic though he is, Field acknowledges that this is really quite low-level learning. Getting the kids to create games themselves is more effective. The most useful aspect of what he was doing was a clever combination of Flash, SCORM and Moodle to track usage. The students think they’re trying to get maximum goals scored in a football animation. In the process their teacher gets to monitor their level of understanding via the mark they’ve got in the Moodle gradebook.

Field maintains a site called ReviseIT where many of these games can be found. What’s really clever is his authoring tools site, where you can adapt the games with your own content and save them as flash files for incorporation within your VLE.

Dan Leighton was waxing lyrical about the benefits of elearning this morning at a Moodle event for schools near Cambridge. He finds it particularly useful for seeing when his pupils have uploaded assignments.

He demonstrated a neat use of Jing to record his voice and his mouse clicks while producing feedback for students on spreadsheet assignments. He also uses video recordings of himself and finds this quicker and more effective than producing written feedback where the lack of a tone of voice can lead to misunderstandings.

What is impressive is that Leighton has rolled out Moodle at Cottonham Village College with hundreds of students at virtually no additional cost to his institution. Using a cheap hosting service like the one I use for this blog to run Moodle, he believes he has engaged his students much more by using elearning and attributes their achievement of significantly enhanced results primarily to the use of Moodle.

Extensive use of video is now using up the college’s bandwidth limit and they’re examining different hosting options but Leighton recommends this lightweight option for any institution wishing to carry out piloting of Moodle.

Blackboard has the lion’s share of the US higher education LMS market but how’s it faring in the UK? Further education colleges are switching to Moodle in droves as I noted recently. But changing your VLE can be a massive project for a large university, involving the migration of huge amounts of content and upskilling of staff.

Alejandro Chiner, Service Innovation Officer at the University of Warwick has surveyed UK higher education institutions to find that 63% are still centrally providing commercial VLEs (presumably mostly Blackboard/WebCT). 23% provide Moodle centrally and 10.5% SAKAI. Chiner reports:

there is a growing number of institutions who have migrated to Open Source (OS) alternatives, and they seem happy with the outcome. The migration process is a major project that can take two years, but the costs associated are quickly offset by the savings in licence fees. More importantly, OS allows VLE integration with a range of ad-hoc systems and freedom from vendor lock-in. The HEI community is developing a range of cutting-edge application plug-in and tools to integrate other systems with either Moodle or Sakai.

I’m not convinced that the licence fee savings quickly offset the costs of migration but there is undoubtedly greater flexibility and the ability to adapt the product and easily integrate it with other systems. And he’s right about the growing range of innovative applications being developed by universities worldwide.

Elearning is taking place in all universities and colleges to varying degrees. For many it is now a strategic priority but few institutions could honestly say that it is being rolled out across all courses systematically, and some have not yet even defined a common language for what elearning is.

Benchmarking and accreditation processes are emerging and can help institutions to assess where they are in relation to others and give pointers as to how they can increase their adoption of elearning. One such initiative is the UNIQUe (European University Quality in eLearning) programme which has developed a methodology for certifying institutional competence in elearning. I’ve spent the past couple of days at Università politecnica delle Marche as a peer assessor for an evaluation by UNIQUe.

After a series of semi-structured interviews with different groups of staff and students, examination of the elearning systems and a large number of espressos, my co-assessor Annemie Boonen and I now have a good picture of where this university is and what needs to be done to increase uptake. There are similar barriers to the adoption of elearning to those found in universities elsewhere such as lack of incentives for engagement by staff, whose career advancement is based on research output rather than excellence in facilitating elearning. This is exacerbated in Italy by a rigid legal system specifying the role of the professor, including aspects such as the number of contact hours they must have with students. With high teaching loads and the constant pressure to publish, innovation in teaching has to be crammed into the margins of academics’ time.

The UNIQUe methodology involves a self-assessment report, a two day visit by the peer-assessors, and a subsequent decision by the UNIQUe board as to whether to accredit the institution or not. The methodology examines institutional strategy, its commitment to innovation, its openness to the wider community, the elearning systems and resources, student and staff support, quality issues and management of IPR. While it’s easy to be cynical about the bureaucracy involved in such exercises and there is certainly scope to tweak the UNIQUe methodology, I now have no doubt of the value for an institution of a period of intensive navel-gazing and of receiving an external perspective on its efforts to embed elearning.

Maybe not one of Quo’s better songs… Well I’m not in the army but I did stay in an army camp last night. I was giving a talk about Moodle to various military personnel which kicked off a discussion over dinner in the Officers’ Mess about elearning. It was fascinating to compare the issues faced by our respective organisations in moving towards greater use of elearning.

The number of people in the UK defence forces is about the same as the number of students in the Open University: around 200,000. They’re distributed widely around the UK and other parts of the World. Another similarity is the (sometimes justified) fear staff have that something will go wrong with the electronic delivery, particularly where assessment is concerned. Students can be very quickly alienated when something goes wrong, and those opposed to elearning will be quick to say “I told you so”.

The differences between the organisations are stark, though. There is much less diversity in the type of learners found doing a course in the army; you would tend to study with people of similar age, race, background and interests who already know each other and have forged a shared identity. At the Open University (and increasingly at other universities) there is growing diversity in our learners who may have very little in common other than the course they are studying.

There is also a distrust of independent learning in certain sectors of the forces, and a feeling among many instructors that unless you get learners together in one place and keep an eye on them, they’ll just waste their time. Open University students are also likely to be more motivated to learn than squaddies crammed into a classroom, many of whom have poor IT and literacy skills. Computer-based learning in the military has tended to be instructional with minimal collaboration; the introduction of wikis and blogs in a course would raise a few eyebrows.

An additional problem faced by the forces is the fear that laptops and mobile devices will be misplaced, thus posing a security risk and the potential for embarrassing revelations of incompetence immediately latched onto by the media.

Nevertheless things are moving forward and attitudes are changing. Moodle is being looked at with great interest, as is the use of mobile learning devices in the field. But don’t expect to see British soldiers podcasting from Afghanistan any time soon.

EDUCAUSE has carried out its annual survey of the undergraduate use of technology. ECAR Fellows Judy Borreson Caruso and Gail Salaway discussed their preliminary findings today at the ECAR Research Symposium in Boulder (the report will be published in October).

27,317 students from 98 US institutions took part in the survey plus a few from overseas institutions. There were also 75 students in focus groups at five institutions and 5,800 written comments from the survey.

Computer ownership is now almost ubiquitous - with 98.5% of those surveyed owning one. Interestingly there has been a drop in desktop computer ownership of 28% since last year. Now 80.5% of students have a laptop. 66.1% own an internet-capable phone and 10.2% of them use that facility daily. When students were asked why they didn’t use the internet more on their phones they commented that there was no point as they could just use their laptops.

So what do they do with their computers? 93.4% access the university library website. 91.9% use presentation software (eg Powerpoint). 85.9% use spreadsheets. 82.3% the LMS/VLE and 73.9% graphics packages such as Photoshop.

Students rate their ability to search for information online very highly - though faculty, and certainly librarians, would tend to disagree…

The negative and positive comments about the LMS/VLE are about equal in quantity and are mainly that:

1. It adds convenience (eg for tracking grades)
2. Many instructors are not very good at using it - or just don’t use it
3. It needs to be more reliable

Social networking sites are being used by 82% of students, and the median usage is about 4 hours per week. Facebook is used by 88.9%, MySpace by 48.3% (mainly for communicating with friends from high school), and other services such as LinkedIn hardly at all. Those who don’t use social networking sites are either not interested (62.6%), don’t like them (40.5%) or have privacy concerns (34.5%).

96.5% of students use social networks to stay in touch with friends, 67.4% to share photos, music, videos and other documents, 51.4% to find out about other people, and 49.5% to communicate with classmates about course-related topics. This is significant as it is by-passing institutional systems but maybe it’s just a modern version of the student coffee bar where the conversations were never controlled or monitored by the institution anyway.

Students have 100-200 online friends on average, and 28.3% of them have more than 300.

Typical comments about social networking sites included “It’s addictive - is there some sort of drug?”, “I’m on there all day - whenever I can get there.”, and, interestingly, a less enthusiastic response from the typical engineering student: “What’s the big deal? If I want to talk to someone I will.”

The 30% of students who listen to podcasts are overwhelmingly positive about them, though only 4% had listened to course-related podcasts. Webcasted recordings of lectures were also very popular. 17% of students say they skip classes when the lectures are posted online - a perennial fear of many lecturers.

One respondent reported that he never bothered with lectures or course materials but just got everything he needed from wikipedia. He passed the course competently…

America is obsessed about the price of oil which has hit $4 per gallon (about $1 per litre or £0.50). With a society and economy built on cheap fuel which until recently cost $30 a barrel, is now $139, and is predicted today to rise to $250 next year due to speculators and growing Asian demand, the media here is full of energy saving measures and renewables, and it’s now a bummer to own a hummer.

For Bob Franza, Executive Science Director of the Seattle Science Foundation, the way forward is to examine every human activity and see if it couldn’t be done better in SecondLife. This includes higher education where so many students travel so many miles to sit in large buildings on campuses which are expensive to heat and power. Franza points out that it makes much more sense to move photons around than electrons. At the ECAR Research Symposium in Boulder this morning he described many examples of activities being carried out in SecondLife in his institution, from building entire new hospitals so designs can be tested by future staff, to the dissection of bodies by medical students.

A member of the audience objected to Franza’s encouragement to stop thinking about physical space as the basis for everything. She asserted that young people now entering higher education will soon no longer have the skills for building telescopes - they’re not getting enough opportunities to interact with physical objects. Franza countered by saying that building a telescope is a perfect application for SecondLife - assembling the parts online allows you to try various combinations very cheaply, allows a lot more people to do it, and drives innovation in ways which we’d never imagined.

SecondLife and similar immersive technologies are going to be boosted by a nation of drivers increasingly confined to their homes. As the rising cost of fossil fuels is reflected in the costs of almost everything else including campus-based education, Americans will have to make hard choices about whether the benefits of a face-to-face university experience justify the cost. Online education programmes will be increasingly attractive.

Meanwhile, with my European mentality, I marvelled at the ability to fill a tank of petrol at the weekend here for just over $40… I’d like to see the headlines here if people were having to spend the more than $100 for a full tank I now have to pay back home.