Virtual Worlds

Managing challenges

IT Challenges

At GippsTAFE the IT system’s security is a major issue for learners needing to access Second Life. Currently, access to Second Life requires many previously closed ports to be open and this is only permitted from 9 to 4 Monday to Friday when the IT department can monitor the traffic. A solution is needed so students can access Second Life from within the institute as required.
Making sure access is restricted to students requiring Second Life is a challenge. GippsTAFE has tried several methods but, to date, no permanent solution has been found.
Knowing where students are located within Second Life can be a problem. If a student is not on a private island owned by the educational organisation, although they can be tracked and offered teleport back, it is difficult to monitor where they are. The Warragul VCAL teacher involved in the project spent significant time in Second Life with her students before the project’s island was purchased. She created the student avatars and retained the passwords. This meant she knew when students were in Second Life and could restrict access to class time – and she monitored the room, both online and physically, during in-class use. She had been with the students for two years and had an excellent relationship with them built on trust. She acknowledged that, for teachers who did not know their students so well, policing the use of Second Life could be an issue.
At GippsTAFE, from a bandwidth perspective, it is better if students access Second Life outside the institute. This raises issues of equity and access, as the cost of heavy bandwidth, computer memory capacity and graphic card requirement can all prevent student access from home. At GippsTAFE, the IT department does not support any non-institute computers, so, if a student has any IT issues, it is currently up to the teacher to try to resolve them. However this system relies on the teacher having sufficient IT capability and therefore may not be sustainable in the long term.
At GippsTAFE, student use of Second Life breaches two aspects of the institute’s Student Use of Computers Policy. Second Life can be considered as a sophisticated chat system. This breaches the policy’s guideline No 6: Internet access is intended for use only with your studies; chat groups, Internet gaming etc are strictly forbidden. Second Life has indecent and offensive materials available. This breaches the policy’s guideline No 9: Indecent and offensive material is not permitted to be downloaded from the Internet and display of this material on institute computers is forbidden. Should such materials be of a kind which would incur criminal sanctions, police will be informed.

Non IT Challenges

From an educational perspective, it is better that students accessing Second Life not be in a classroom together. This is particularly important if trying to alter the social hierarchy within a group or give very quiet students the opportunity to take leadership roles. The solution is either to provide access from a number of different locations around a campus, which is often not possible, or have students outside the institute, which would create the same challenge as indicated in point four above
Teachers and educational professionals need to ‘think outside the box’ to maximise the educational benefits of Second Life. In the project team’s opinion, using it in the classroom is not maximising its potential. Thinking laterally and starting to consider alternatives to current teaching practices, in terms of classes, attendance, on-campus studies and the like, would significantly open up the possibilities for learning in Second Life.
The fact some learner groups include people who should use Second Life’s teen grid and others who should use the adult ‘world’ raises a major issue. The project clearly identified that Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning (VCAL) learners could benefit significantly from using Second Life. However, VCAL is taught in secondary schools as an alterative to the Victoria Certificate of Education (VCE), while in TAFE institutions and community settings the learner cohort could range from 15 years to mature age.

This creates a real dilemma for training organisations. It is not permissible to have learners under 18 in Second Life’s adult world. Do you use the teen world? People over 18 should not be in there! This raises huge issues in terms of using Second Life for any learner cohort in which some learners are under age. This is arguably the age group that could benefit most from Second Life, yet under-18s cannot participate in any educational program using the adult world. Only groups with all learners over 18 can gain the benefits of using Second Life’s adult world. The GippsTAFE trials did not explore the possibility of using Second Life’s teen grid for wholly-under-18 groups. But a teacher would not be able to access the teen world without first having applied for, and been granted, special permission to enter it.

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Australian Flexible Learning Framework