JISC

Four information-driven and four avatar-driven PBL scenarios will be created and delivered through the SL platform for distance learning students on healthcare courses based at the University of Coventry, Kingston University and St George’s University of London. The scenarios will go through re-iterative development, testing and evaluation cycles with students and tutors to inform the creation process, before they are embedded within the course. The scenarios and tools developed as a result of this project will be made available to the wider higher education community, and findings and best practice disseminated.

Anticipated outputs and outcomes

The project anticipates a number of outcomes:

• An immersive collaborative model of PBL in SL for off-campus and workplace learning
• An evaluation of student and staff responses to online PBL in virtual worlds
• A model for teacher creation and delivery of virtual scenarios within virtual worlds

Outputs will be of long-term benefit to teachers and courses attempting to improve, or at least maintain collaborative learning, against a background of decreasing student face-to-face contact, and a higher proportion of off-campus self-directed learning. Whilst not replacing the face-to-face experience, it will be possible to evaluate whether this form of immersive PBL may offer significant benefits to the learner

Technology / Standards used

The open source web application Labyrinth is an experimental educational pathway authoring and delivery system, originally developed at the University of Edinburgh. Labyrinth will be used to develop the PBL scenarios. It adheres to the Medbiquitous Virtual Patient (MVP) open standard (an XML data standard for the exchange and reuse of virtual patients). The virtual patients scenarios stored in the MVP XML format will also contain metadata descriptors stored in the LOM (Learning Object Metadata) standard defined by the IEEE.

A web-service will be developed for this project that will process the XML output from Labyrinth and send the information to Second Life. This service will sit on the Institutional servers and be independent from both Labyrinth and Second Life, but initiate communication between the two systems. The web service will process scenarios stored in this XML standard. The web service itself will be based on existing standards for web communication protocols such as SOAP and REST.

Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its Residents (www.secondlife.com) and developed by Linden Lab. SL has an existing and active community of educators within SL, and is one of the cheapest and simplest virtual worlds to develop content for.

Lead Institution

• Coventry University
  

Project partners

• St George's University of London
• Kingston University