Universities Turn to Gaming and Entertainment to Enhance E-Learning

US News & World Report has a nice trio of articles on online learning this week, including one about Dr. Walter Lewin over at MIT, who has created the world’s best online video lecture series on college physics; the increased use of Web 2.0 and gaming apps in online courses; and the increased use of Second Life for educational purposes.

While Dr. Lewin doesn’t use educational videogames per se, he does engage viewers with online lectures that actively illustrate the concepts covered in the lecture. The series ran about $100,000 to produce, and cover Physics 1, 2, and 3 at MIT. All are free to watch by anyone, and Dr. Lewin has garnered international praise for his work. Other professors now use his lectures in their own courses as well.

The SL article is by Lucia Graves, who wrote an article I discussed in October 2007 on dissecting virtual frogs. Graves interviews Jeremy Kemp over at San Jose State’s SLIS, opening the story with an anecdote of students showing up for class in SL as avatars resembling Jell-O or butterflies (no mention was made of the infamous flying phalli SL is sometimes known for).

SL is becoming something of a phenomenon in college online education. Harvard Law opened a course to SL netizens; Princeton owns an island there; and the state of Louisiana is funding a 5 island initiative studying the value of 3-D virtual interactive environments (VIEs) for education. Merrill Johnson over U. New Orleans asserts that even if the hurricane-prone state loses classrooms to disaster, virtual conference rooms can allow classes to continue.

The remainder of the article is devoted to pros and cons of using SL for education. On the pro side:

Educators say Second Life is an effective teaching tool in part because it provides a social laboratory where role-playing, simulations, exploration, and experimentation can be tried out in a relatively risk-free environment. But perhaps the most touted benefit of Second Life is the opportunity it gives students to interact with people around the world—there are users registered from more than 100 countries. It also allows students to visit places that no longer exist, like a townscape reconstructed to look like Elizabethan England in the late 16th century.

On the con side: behavior issues, including griefing, have resulted in Ohio U. shutting its island down after a virtual gunman shot the place up and Woodbury U. permanently closed its island following unabated student misbehavior. Robert Vernon, over at Indiana, is quoted as indicating SL requires a certain level of proficiency to navigate. Peter Ludlow at U. Toronto notes the lack of affordances in the environment negatively impact teaching. This is a point I made in a paper published last year, BTW.

Finally, Kim Clark writes a nice article entitled “New Answers for E-Learning.”

Some professors and schools are redesigning their courses to take advantage of the Web’s interactive and visual possibilities, adopting some bleeding-edge technologies such as gamelike simulations and digital avatars to make online courses more exciting and more effective than traditional classrooms … A growing number of online courses are requiring students to participate in blogs, wikis, or gamelike simulations.

Clark includes a list of university initiatives that focus on these “gamelike simulations”:

Barbara Christe, who teaches biomedical engineering technology at Indiana University-Purdue University- Indianapolis, uses simulations that allow students to scroll over circuit diagrams to see how changes in current affect resistance, for example. Michigan State University has developed a Jeopardy!-like website, packed with quiz questions that science and math students can answer to see how well they’ve mastered key concepts. The University of Maryland-University College has developed a gamelike simulation of a crime scene for students in its criminalistics class. And a growing number of teachers are experimenting with presenting lectures and information as avatars in Second Life.

Although the quiz show study format is an old way to review multiple choice test items, the simulations seem well suited for online format since students aren’t traveling to a physical lab. Open source simulations may be a good way to incorporate these across a wide spectrum of college classes since it seems that good ones would be rather expensive for each university to create. If not open source, perhaps a version developed elsewhere that prevents each university from re-inventing the wheel, something along the lines of the K-12 simulation-type software for math found at the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives over at Utah State. Finally, the crime scene simulation sounds like something that might be able to delve into higher order thinking, if done right.

References:
Clark, K. (2008, January 21). A new Physics superstar. US News & World Report, p. 48.

Clark, K. (2008, January 21). New answers for e-learning. US News & World Report, pp. 46-49.

Graves, L. (2008, January 21). A second life for higher ed. US News & World Report, pp. 49-50.