MANAGING HUMANITARIAN EMERGENCIES

Teaching and Learning with a Virtual Humanitarian Disaster Tool

Olatokunbo Ajinomoh, Lisa Dow, Alan Miller, Alasdair Gordon-Gibson and Eleanor Burt

School of Computer Science, School of Management, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, U.K.

Keywords: Virtual Worlds, Humanitarian Emergencies, Collaborative Learning, Scenario-based Training.

Abstract: The importance of specialist intervention in the form of humanitarian aid from governments, NGOs and

other aid agencies during a humanitarian emergency cannot be over-emphasised. Humanitarian aid is the

assistance provided in response to a humanitarian crisis. Humanitarian aid may be logistical, financial or

material and its central aim is to alleviate human suffering and save lives. This paper describes an inter-

disciplinary project that created the Virtual Humanitarian Disaster learning and teaching resource (VHD)

that is centred on the events occurring in the aftermath of an earthquake. To facilitate learning, scenarios

with integrated task dilemmas have been modelled which will provide the opportunity for users of the

resource to explore the inter-relationships between the key areas of activities which are important to the

NGOs and other bodies which deliver humanitarian aid. Such areas include geo-political relationships, legal

and regulatory requirements, information management, logistic, financial and human resource management

imperatives. The VHD is primarily aimed at students. It creates a more flexible learning and teaching

environment when compared with traditional classroom methods. The resource enables students to make

decisions concerning critical situations within the controlled environment of a virtual world, where the

consequences of any wrong decisions, will not directly impact on lives and property. The VHD has been

embedded within an undergraduate module of the School of Management as it specifically relates to the

final thematic area within which the module engages, namely the strategic and operational challenges faced

by NGOs operating in the “humanitarian relief industry”. We demonstrate that virtual worlds can be used to

enhance learning and make it more engaging. The VHD affords students the opportunity to explore given

scenarios in accordance with a specified budget and in so doing, they realise module outcomes in a more

active and authentic learning environment.

1 INTRODUCTION

In the event of a humanitarian disaster or

emergency, there are several groups of people

responsible for managing the sudden influx of

displaced populations and providing immediate aid.

One such group is humanitarian aid agencies.

As a result of new and evolving standards and

guidelines, changing donor roles, challenges in

accessing populations in need, chronic conflicts and

irregular climate patterns which have left

communities more vulnerable than ever.

Humanitarian aid operations have become

increasingly complex and exposed the need to grow

a pool of well-trained humanitarian professionals.

This paper discusses the rationale for, and

describes the process involved in, the creation of the

Virtual Humanitarian Disaster (VHD) resource and

how it is relates to the subject of humanitarian

assistance. Both areas are examined further in the

following sections. The technical and educational

platforms that support the VHD are detailed in

Section two. Section three describes the VHD design

and specific features, while section four documents

the evaluation process.

1.1 Refugees and Humanitarian Aid

The 1951 UN Convention’s defines a refugee as:

“Any person who owing to well-founded fear

of being persecuted for reasons of race,

religion, nationality, membership of a

particular social group or political opinion,

is outside the country of his nationality and is

unable, or owing to fear is unwilling to avail

himself of the protection of that country; or

who, not having a nationality and being

outside the country of his former habitual

Ajinomoh O., Miller A., Dow L., Gordon-Gibson A. and Burt E..

MANAGING HUMANITARIAN EMERGENCIES - Teaching and Learning with a Virtual Humanitarian Disaster Tool.

DOI: 10.5220/0003923400550064

In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2012), pages 55-64

ISBN: 978-989-8565-06-8

 2012 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

residence, is unable, or having such fear is

unwilling to return to it” (UNHCR, 2011).

This definition has been revised since 1951 with

many amendments and recommendations on the

status of refugees (D’Souza, 2007).The term refugee

is sometimes used to describe internally displaced

populations who fall outside of the legal definition

of the convention. In a number of cases, people

affected by disasters do not become refugees but are

internally displaced. Displaced populations leave

their homes in groups, usually due to a sudden

impact, such as an earthquake or a flood, threat or

conflict and there is usually an intention to return

home (IFRC, 2011).

Humanitarian aid has been described as

consisting of a series of tasks such as improving

living conditions, providing basic care and support

to affected populations in humanitarian emergency

areas (Beristain, 2006). It has also been described as

a professional discipline with the noble goals of

helping fellow human beings to alleviate hunger and

pain, giving succour to starving and homeless

people, re-uniting ruptured families and rebuilding

destroyed societies (Cahill, 2003).

1.2 Learning in Virtual Worlds

The humanitarian emergency report (DFID, 2011)

highlighted the fact that well trained and

experienced personnel are a major factor in

successful humanitarian disaster response. The VHD

enables simulation based training to inform students

about the dilemmas aid workers encounter on the

job.

The term simulation-based training refers to a

collection of training methods, which are aimed at

bridging the gap between classroom knowledge and

actual practice, by placing the learner in a realistic

situation within a context in which the individual is

forced to bring to bear prior knowledge and make

decisions to solve the problem. This method of

training offers an immersive experience for the

learner and provides an opportunity to evaluate and

reflect upon their decisions. The advantage here

when compared with on the job training lies in the

fact that any decisions made in the course of the

simulation would not have any effects beyond the

simulation, as opposed to a real world situation

where such decisions may have far reaching

consequences which impact on human lives.

Humanitarian aid training is predominantly

classroom-based, and the completion of a classroom-

based course alone, does not necessarily equip

personnel for complex humanitarian operations

where they may be left overwhelmed and barely able

to cope in real deployments.

Humanitarian aid teams deployed in emergencies

are often required to initiate rapid assessments and

implement appropriate interventions within days of a

humanitarian emergency. Coupled with a need for a

rapid response in conditions of extreme physical and

mental stress, the aid workers must adapt to and deal

with unfamiliar demographics, cultures, political

environments and climates. This further complicates

the task of implementing relief activities that are

timely and well organised.

Teaching within virtual worlds using the VHD

provides a new approach for learning where

conventional e-learning and blended learning cannot

easily reach. There are benefits when using virtual

worlds in education, either as a supplementary

resource or as the main platform for teaching. The

main benefits are; enriched interaction whereby face

to face communication is replicated more closely

than in other mediums and users are allowed to

replicate body language and gestures (Grondstedt,

2008), increased speed of decision making when

users work together on a challenge in groups

(Heiphetz, 2010). Other benefits include; better

conceptual demonstrations on complex scientific

concepts, rich content engagement for learning,

higher learning autonomy for students and

facilitating collaborations between physically remote

students. (Perera et al, 2009).

In summary, skills that were relevant a decade

ago are insufficient to ensure success in today’s

complex humanitarian relief environment. For this

reason, there is need for a new approach to training

and skills development in the humanitarian aid

industry.

2 THE TECHNOLOGY

There are several 3D environments available such as

World of Warcraft, Blue Mars, IMVU, MOOVE,

Active Worlds and Second Life. These 3D

environments can be categorised as either Massive

Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games

(MMORPG) or Multi User Virtual Environment

(MUVE). A MUVE provides an intuitive 3D

environment where users are represented by avatars.

This presence is engaging users are able to, and like

interacting with each other. This in turn provides

natural support for group work and collaboration.

MUVEs contain tools that allow users to alter the

terrain and to create 3D models. The environment is

programmable. MUVEs are multimedia platform;

CSEDU2012-4thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation

video, sound, pictures animations can all be

supported. Thus a rich set of educational resources

can be brought together and accessed through a 3D

virtual world client.

The participants of a MUVE are free to create

new artefacts and engage in any form of social

interaction. It is this freedom that makes MUVEs

attractive when creating exploratory learning

environments (Sturgeon et al, 2006).

Of the available virtual world environments

Second Life has been the most widely used. It offers

a good approximation to the real world and also

offers flexibility to its users. (Loueiro, 2011).

Figure 1: Sloodle quiz chair.

Second Life is currently used within educational

institutions as a platform for learning (Kemp, 2006)

and prior to this time; it has been the most common

virtual world technology in use in education. It was

not originally designed for open educational use and

as a result has significant social, economic and

technical drawbacks when used for that purpose.

These drawbacks include the commercial cost,

limited programmability, restricted program

resource usage, severely restricted backup, copy and

sharing of content (including one’s own), limited

communication with facilities outside of the virtual

world, the inappropriate presence of “adult content”,

age restrictions that can cut across higher education

classes, and the difficulty of management of user ids

and credit-bearing coursework (Allison et al., 2011).

OpenSim shares the same user interface as SL

and clients are typically interoperable. However,

OpenSim is open source simulator and can be used

to support self-hosted virtual worlds with local

administration and maintenance (Sturgeon et al,

2009). If an institution wants to run its own Virtual

World service OpenSim offers an attractive option.

Developing, deploying and running a local

virtual world service allows opportunities to

improve support for content creation, application

development, service provision and system

development. These in turn allows the range of in

world activities that are supported by the virtual

world to be enriched.

OpenSim facilitates the sharing of resources

through OpenSim archive (OAR) files. Through

running a local virtual world service the full power

of virtual worlds can be utilised. Administrative

control opens the opportunity to enable powerful

programming paradigms and enables more complex

and powerful applications to be built.

Running a local service, offers the possibility of

significantly reducing the marginal costs associated

with the service. This in turn means that there is

sufficient in world space to enable students to

construct realistic virtual refugee camps. .

2.1 Moodle and Sloodle

Moodle is a Course Management System (CMS)

with a set of tools built into an interface, which

make the task of learning central. Using these tools,

courses can be arranged by week, topic or social

arrangement (Cole, 2007). Moodle offers three

advantages amongst all CMS namely; it is open

sourced, community based and its unique

educational philosophy.

Sloodle is a plug-in for Moodle which came

about as a result of a need to provide an additional

set of tools to support learning and teaching in a

virtual world. It aims to provide a means for

effective learning, support and management within a

3D multi-user virtual environment (Livingstone,

2007).

The Sloodle application is integrated into

Moodle so that a participant can be in-world and

receive material directly from Moodle (Hodge,

2011). This helps avoid dependence on an ad hoc

collection of third-party add-ons. It also enables

educators to focus on teaching and the content of

lessons rather that the process of content creation

and having to learn the underlying language for

content creation (Livingstone, 2007).

Some studies have suggested that the way in

which learning objects are designed and the contexts

in which they are situated are important in

determining their educational value (Getchell et al.,

2005). Sloodle has several in-built functionalities

such as the administration of quizzes in virtual

worlds, the submission of assignments by students,

as well as a blogging and chat feature (Cohen,

MANAGINGHUMANITARIANEMERGENCIES-TeachingandLearningwithaVirtualHumanitarianDisasterTool

2008). It combines with the Moodle CMS to create a

new dimension in learning. This occurs through the

configuration of a number of integration points

which offer two way interactions between Moodle

and Sloodle (Marmaridis, 2009). This integration is

made possible by various Sloodle objects such as

quiz chairs (Figure 1) linked to quizzes set up on

Moodle, presenter objects for multimedia

presentations (Figure 2) and polling tools which

facilitate in-world voting (Figure 3).

Figure 2: Sloodle presenter.

Figure 3: Sloodle choice tool.

In other to achieve the desired level of

integration, the Sloodle system not only provides a

mechanism for authenticating users between both

systems, but it also maintains details of user

identities as the users move from one system to

another in the course of their normal learning

interactions (Marmaridis, 2009). This process is

known as registration or linking and it involves the

linking of the OpenSim Avatar to the Moodle

account through the Sloodle registration booth

located in the VHD. In order to accomplish this, the

Moodle site stores a list of Avatars it has interacted

with and then associates each Avatar with a

particular Moodle account.

3 THE VHD

The motivation for creating the VHD in a virtual

world was based on recognition of the fact that

virtual worlds provide an immersive and

collaborative environment which could be used to

realistically and safely simulate operational, moral

and ethical dilemmas that humanitarian aid workers

encounter in the field. These simulations allow users

to develop key decision-making skills as they

explore and encounter dilemmas. They can also

reflect on the possible consequences of their choices,

without the associated endangerment of human lives

that would occur in a real world situation.

The key aim of developing the VHD was to

create a virtual humanitarian disaster teaching and

learning resource that would present students with

some of the dilemmas faced by humanitarian aid

workers responding to humanitarian emergencies. It

also aims to use the power of virtual simulations to

impart knowledge and learning in a way, which

enhances classroom based teaching methods. Figure

4 depicts the structural layout of the VHD

illustrating the relationship between its educational

and technological components.

Figure 4: VHD structural layout.

3.1 Functionality

The operational dilemmas embedded within the

VHD have been drawn from critical areas of activity

for humanitarian aid agencies that include for

example; geo-political relationships, legal/regulatory

requirements, information management, logistical,

human resource management and financial

imperatives as well as the broader considerations

related to the humanitarian imperative.

CSEDU2012-4thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation

The tool provides the flexibility to drill down and

explore an issue arising in any of these areas of

activity in depth or to examine interconnections

across all of these areas and the challenges and

implications arising therefrom. It also allows a 3D

reconstruction of relevant scenarios to be designed

and built and enables participants to role-play in

realistic scenarios in-world. Students will be briefed

about their roles prior to the role-playing exercise

and when in the environment of the VHD, they will

be represented by avatars. Figure 5 shows a use case

of the key actors of the VHD and the functional

benefits derived by each actor. A user can be a

student or an educator, with each role having its own

specific benefits or sharing benefits with the other

role.

Figure 5: VHD use case.

The use of the VHD will be preceded by a

briefing session with students in which the aims and

nature of the exercise will be explained. Students

will be invited to reflect upon and discuss the

operational dilemmas and appropriate responses to

the dilemmas. They will also be required to evaluate

and discuss the implications arising from their

decisions. Relevant academic literature will be

drawn on at the de-briefing stage, to ground the

discussion and to assist critical reflection on the part

of the students.

3.2 The Learning Scenarios

There are two main generic scenarios depicted in the

VHD based on dilemmas that a humanitarian aid

worker would be most likely to encounter in the

course of carrying out his or her duties.

• Scenario 1: Disaster Support Headquarters

• Scenario 2: Consideration of the internally

displaced population affected by the disaster, the

building of a refugee camp to accommodate the

displaced population.

On the basis of these scenarios, the students are

expected to undertake two main tasks:

• Walk through a total of 13 task dilemmas which

have been built into the disaster support

headquarters and refugee camp scenarios. The

facilitators may add new dynamics or considerations

based on the developing scenarios;

• Build an ideal refugee camp on the training

island using objects in the inventory toolkit.

3.2.1 Disaster Support Headquarters

Figure 6: Organisation structure.

Disaster Support Headquarters is the starting point

of the VHD. The learning objective is to set the

scene for the disaster by briefing students about their

various roles. To achieve this, an organisational

chart has been created. Job descriptions and roles of

each key executive have been placed in a notecard

and offer students the opportunity to understand the

perspectives of the executives who are at the helm of

MANAGINGHUMANITARIANEMERGENCIES-TeachingandLearningwithaVirtualHumanitarianDisasterTool

affairs in a humanitarian aid agency. It is based on

the premise that there are sometimes differing

opinions between the frontline operational staff and

headquarters staff whose interpretations may be

more strategic. Each of these groups may often be

unmindful of the conflicting priorities being

confronted by the other.

In order to accomplish the learning objective, the

adopted strategy is to have students walk through

some of the dilemmas they might encounter while in

the field. These dilemmas have been chosen to

examine key issues such as;

• The implications of a reduction in donated

income over a period of time

• The legal and contractual agreements in place

with suppliers and the sufficiency of such contracts

• Political concerns involving donor governments

• The hostilities and strained relationships which

can arise between neighbouring communities in the

aftermath of a humanitarian emergency, as well as

the responsibility for management of refugee camps

and competition for funding amongst the various

agencies

• The security procedures within a humanitarian

aid agency to protect its personnel

• The principle of ‘do no harm’ and the various

ways in which it is manifested.

This strategy teaches students through an interactive

process using notecards, which have been placed in

objects in-world (Figure 7). When a student interacts

with specific objects, a notecard appears which they

can choose to either discard immediately after use or

save for future reference. Each notecard contains

details of a specific task dilemma designed to serve

as a topic of discussion for students to resolve in

groups at the briefing office (Figure 8). One such

task dilemma, the personnel safety task dilemma,

concerns the security procedures in place within an

NGO operation and is intended to encourage

discussion on how operations management can

ensure that their personnel are protected as best

possible, without compromising on their ability to

perform their humanitarian work.

The supplier task dilemma examines a scenario

occurring one week after the humanitarian

emergency when it has become clear that the scale

of the humanitarian emergency is such that will

completely deplete existing stockpiles of blankets

and a crucial protein-rich bar in the midst of the

crisis. During this scenario, the suppliers have

announced that they want to re-negotiate the price of

further consignments. This is intended to prompt a

discussion relating to the legal and contractual

agreements in place with suppliers and the

sufficiency of such contracts. Another medium used

is in- world browsers, which have been configured

to access specific websites relevant to the module.

These sites include amongst others the International

Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies

(IFRC) website which provides an emergency items

catalogue for disaster response teams and the World

Food Programme Logistics Cluster site which

provides logistics planning information for

humanitarian aid agencies. The video of a

humanitarian emergency news broadcast is also

available in world to set the tone for the

humanitarian emergency.

Figure 7: Task dilemmas.

Figure 8: Disaster support briefing office.

By adopting the foregoing strategy, we hope to

achieve the following objectives:

• Developing the students’ appreciation of how

NGOs respond to disaster situations with regards to

the relatively standard arrangements that will be in

place in a particular NGO.

• Creating an appreciation of the issues that will

emerge unexpectedly in the course of a disaster

response exercise.

• Raising an awareness of key features in the

humanitarian aid landscape of which they need to

take account as they consider their responses to

situations that arise in the course of a humanitarian

aid mission.

• Allowing students to realise that choices that are

made about how to deal with a particular situation

CSEDU2012-4thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation

will have implications and to try to follow through

on this by anticipating what these may involve.

• Trying to achieve as much authenticity as

possible within the limits of the VHD design.

3.2.2 Building a Refugee Camp

An island has been created to allow students to build

their own refugee camp. Prior to attempting this

task, students are given a briefing sheet containing a

prepared budget of the required human and material

resources needed for the refugee camp. The aim here

is to offer students the freedom and flexibility to

work together in teams to build a refugee camp

using the objects contained in the inventory toolkit

while using the supplied budget as guidance.

The resources contained in the list have been

placed inside a VHD inventory toolkit. In addition to

these objects, other items have been included to test

the student’s discretionary abilities to differentiate

between the useful and unnecessary items.

The human and material resources contained in

the toolkit can be grouped into the following

categories:

Table 1: Inventory toolkit items.

Category Item

Shelter

Family and personnel tents, blankets,

mattresses, etc.

Security

Perimeter fence, security gate, flood

lights, aerial guard tower, etc.

Food

Bottled water, bags of rice, wheat

flour, etc.

Medical

Ambulances, medical tents, medical

supplies, etc.

Sanitation Latrines and bathrooms

Miscellaneous items

Furniture, laptop computers, satellite

phone equipment, etc.

These objects are ready to be positioned in the

refugee camp. Throughout this process students are

confronted with a range of issues such as the correct

camp layout; specifically the proximity of the tents

to one another, sanitation issues such as the number

of families required to share latrines and bathrooms,

security details related to the level of illumination

through floodlights required within the camp at

night. Other issues include the medical needs of the

camp residents particularly the number of

ambulances and medical tents required (Sphere

Project, 2011).

After completion of the task, the students will

visit the reference refugee camp to compare their

work against it.

3.2.3 Reference Refugee Camp

The refugee camp (Figure 9) is a scaled down model

of a real camp set up in the aftermath of a disaster.

Efforts were made to be as realistic as possible in the

representation, to this end; careful research was

conducted into the specific standards, which are to

be adhered to and the required human and material

resources needed to maintain it.

Figure 9: Aerial view of completed refugee camp.

Prior to setting up the refugee camp, its layout

was pre-established (Figure 10) based on the

recommendations from the Office of the United

Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)

which provides specific guidelines and standards

that refugee camps must conform with. These

guidelines specify the minimum size of land on

which a refugee camp should be built. For instance a

camp of 20,000 people should be at least 900,000

square metres in size. It also stipulates the distance

between living quarters, the number of individuals

who may share a tent and the distance of latrines,

water sources and showers from the living quarters.

Figure 10: Refugee camp layout.

Following the research, a detailed budget was

also prepared containing the requirements for a

MANAGINGHUMANITARIANEMERGENCIES-TeachingandLearningwithaVirtualHumanitarianDisasterTool

refugee camp that would accommodate 15,000

individuals. The budget contained details of costs

and quantities of required human and material

resources to meet security, health and other needs.

In accordance with the specifications of the

budget, replicas of real world objects were created

they include: food items (Figure 11), medical

supplies (Figure 12) and basic items such as latrines.

The refugee camp also serves the purpose of

providing a setting for walking through some of the

task dilemmas. Some of these task dilemmas include

the following:

• Deciding on the best way to handle unsolicited

donations

• Identifying and selecting recipients of aid as well

as deciding on distribution methods.

• The various moral and ethical issues the field

workers sometimes encounter based on the principle

of ‘do no harm’.

To sum it up, the learning process of the VHD

begins when students arrive at the disaster support

headquarters briefing room where the scene is set for

the disaster, students are then briefed about their

roles, after the briefing, the various groups are

assigned to different tasks involving the walk

through of the task dilemmas and the creation of the

refugee camp. After the creation of the camp, there

is a review where students compare the newly built

camp with the reference.

4 EVALUATION

At the time of writing evaluation work on the VHD

is ongoing. So far the VHD has been evaluated by

small groups of students for educational value and

the educational benefits. Domain experts have

evaluated the ability of the VHD to address real

world issues. Systems aspects, such as number of

concurrent users supported have also been tested. A

brief explanation of each feature evaluated follows:

Figure 11: Food supplies.

Figure 12: Medical tent in the refugee camp.

• The scenarios were evaluated to ensure that the

end to end functioning of the elements of the VHD

was in order. The users were required to put

themselves in the shoes of the stakeholders, such as

donors, local authorities, DS central HQ and think

through the real world dilemmas which are

presented in the VHD. It was also aimed at helping

users to explore how the VHD resource will function

in the hands of a student user with the purpose of

finding any existing short comings.

• A usability evaluation was performed to establish

the user’s ability to learn to use the resource and

how convenient it was to use and understand it as

well as its level of attractiveness.

• Performance evaluations were carried out to

determine the effectiveness of the resource with

regards to response times involved while interacting

with objects. The purpose of the particular

evaluation was to ensure that the VHD met with

minimum performance criteria, and to identify

which parts caused overall negative performance.

• Interoperability evaluations were aimed at

determining the capability of the OpenSim software

to interact with the Moodle and Sloodle software

components with minimal difficulty.

On the basis of the above evaluation focus, the

following specific features of the VHD were

evaluated and formed the basis of the questionnaire

administered:

• Ease of rezzing the VHD inventory toolkit

objects in-world;

• Ability of the user’s Avatar to register on the

Moodle site from the in-world registration booth;

• Ease of use of the Second Life viewer versus

other viewers such as Hippo, Imprudence and

Meerkat;

• Functionality of audio and video media in world;

• Ability to browse the internet in-world;

CSEDU2012-4thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation

• Ease of retrieving Moodle quizzes via the

Sloodle quiz chairs;

• Accessibility of multimedia presentations via the

Sloodle presenter object;

• The ease of walking through the various

dilemmas.

The following evaluation comments were received

from domain experts:

I was absolutely overwhelmed by what you

had created, its very impressive.

I think it would add a great deal of value to

have someone as the dungeon master.

Students are going to have questions, some

may be pertinent others may not. For

example, knowing the ratio of men to women

will influence the number of latrines. Other

questions may crop up and having someone

with a bit of experience providing answers

would help fill in the gaps.

As far as the actual camp site. I think, if

possible, a river should be added. This would

add a great deal of technical complexity that

would engage students more. For example,

where do you place the latrines, upstream or

downstream? What about wash points? How

close should the tents go to the river taking

into consideration potential flooding?

These comments will be taken onboard and

incorporated in the next phase of development.

On the basis of the evaluation carried out, the

following feedback was received from test users

who were required to walk through the questionnaire

evaluating each of the VHD features in turn and

provide feedback. The results of the evaluation are

summarised in the table below:

Table 2: VHD evaluation.

Feature Result

Viewer

Compatibility

The Second Life viewer 2, Imprudence and

Hippo viewers were evaluated. The Second

Life viewer 2 was found to be the most

compatible and technologically advanced of

the viewers tested as it utilizes the ‘media on

prim’ technology, which makes it possible

to place videos in prims.

Usability

Users required some time and guidance

become familiar with how to navigate the

resource.

Scenarios

Users considered the dilemmas as explicit

enough and adequately representative of the

scenarios.

Functionality

Users also regarded the resource as

successful in simulating the real world.

5 CONCLUSIONS

We have been able to ascertain the success of virtual

worlds in humanitarian aid training and from

evaluation of the resource, we can see that virtual

worlds have the potential to change the way in

which training programmes are delivered.

The VHD could be further enhanced to

incorporate a wider range of scenarios and by

integrating some automation in its environment.

Both enhancements are discussed in more detail

below.

The VHD has incorporated scenarios and

dilemmas related to activities critical to NGOS

ranging from logistics, geo-political relationships,

legal and regulatory requirements, information

management imperatives, logistical imperatives,

human resource management imperatives, and

financial imperatives. The areas covered here are by

no means exhaustive and there are opportunities for

further work based on trends and evolving issues in

the humanitarian aid scene. As new developments

occur, they can be incorporated into the resource

ensuring the continued relevance of the VHD

resource.

The VHD is currently limited in its automation,

but has the potential to enhance the user experience

further, as well as the sense of realism derived from

it by integrating specific automated features. This

could be achieved by; specialised animations to

automate the actions of avatars, the use of particles

to simulate effects like changes in weather and

scripting of objects such as helicopters and motor

vehicles. Automated Heads up Displays (HUDs)

could be used to provide direction within the virtual

world. The process of disbursing budget items could

also be automated in order to help monitor on-going

costs.

Largely, it is anticipated that the VHD has the

potential for wider applications in the ‘real world.

Not only for the use of humanitarian aid workers,

but also in further undergraduate, postgraduate, and

executive level courses that explore complex and

challenging operational dilemmas and decision

making. The VHD creation process and evaluation

results can be drawn upon and applied by academics

and professionals across a range of disciplines.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The project received start-up funding in the form of

a University of St Andrews FILTA award.

MANAGINGHUMANITARIANEMERGENCIES-TeachingandLearningwithaVirtualHumanitarianDisasterTool

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CSEDU2012-4thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation