Exploratory Learning in the ViStA Immersive Environment

Ishbel Duncan

, Janie Brooks

and Alan Miller

School of Computer Science, University of St.Andrews, KY16 9SX, St.Andrews, Scotland

ELT, Kinnessburn House, Kennedy Gardens, KY16 8, St.Andrews, Scotland

Keywords: Virtual Worlds, E-Learning, Immersive Environments.

Abstract: Virtual Worlds have been used for teaching for several years but many issues of usage and evaluation still

exist. In our Virtual St Andrews (ViStA) world, we aim to embed students within a virtual environment

which is a duplicate of a real university to allow for an easier orientation to university life and a mechanism

for reducing acclimatisation stress for (overseas) students. By allowing a multiple of learning approaches,

including self-directed and constructive learning, our world grows organically as student groups develop

areas and scenarios for future students and educators use the world for developing student skills. A variety

of academic schools and English Language tutoring encourages student engagement and input. Further,

Administrative and Support units within the University have been encouraged to support students by

donating information or scenario scripts to be built by dissertation students. Effectively, VistA has become a

cross-university educational and support system for a variety of potential and current students.

1 INTRODUCTION

The Virtual St Andrews University, ViStA, virtual

world project has been developed to encourage

prospective overseas students to learn and interact

with the University prior to their arrival. It has

engaged students and staff from several disciplines

and units across the University and is the focus of

student centred learning and development as well as

interactive enquiry from overseas students.

Initially constructed by researchers in the School

of Computer Science who have experience in other

immersive environments, the project was also

directed by a member of staff from the English

Language Teaching service. Therefore the project

considered non English native speakers as the

primary client or student within the virtual world.

Overseas postgraduate students coming to study in

the UK for one year only for a Masters degree are

faced with many urgent requirements; to be inducted

and oriented within a few days, to understand the

expectations of academic staff, the University’s rules

and regulations, to discover where buildings or staff

reside as well as settle into residences or other

accommodations and make contact with other

students. The rationale behind the decision to build a

virtual St Andrews was concluded from the

experiences of many staff, and students, that one

year postgraduate overseas students, especially, need

some help in understanding the University system

and embedding themselves within their new physical

environment.

The following paper outlines some of the

approaches we have taken to alleviate student stress

and to follow advice garnered from student

interviews and staff requirements for information to

be displayed in a more interactive and enjoyable

way. Part two discusses Virtual Worlds (VWs) and

considers how far the educational research into VWs

has come and Part three summarises the developing

Virtual St Andrews project. The paper concludes

with discoveries from our user trials.

2 VIRTUAL WORLDS AND

IMMERSIVE ENVIRONMENTS

Virtual Worlds (VWs) are an important tool in

modern teaching as well as the entertainment

industries. As immersive environments they can lead

the user, via an avatar with some projected identity,

through a series of escapist games and interactions,

or through a series of learning defined objectives. In

the last decade (Duncan et al., 2011) there has been

an explosion in interest in using VWs for

educational purposes, from primary and secondary

128

Duncan I., Brooks J. and Miller A..

Exploratory Learning in the ViStA Immersive Environment.

DOI: 10.5220/0004387201280135

In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2013), pages 128-135

ISBN: 978-989-8565-53-2

 2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

educational constructive learning through to Higher

Educational constructs in which the student self

learns and self directs.

Mennecke (2008) stated that VWs are part of the

domain of multiplayer online games but without the

organised gameplay. Consequently, the user can

meander through a VW or interact with scenarios in

a personally chosen path or meet with and work

together with other users. VW examples are the

Sims (http://thesims.ea.com/en_us/home), a game

with multiple environments such as towns, hospitals,

holiday islands to visit, or the online game worlds

Second Life (http://secondlife.com/) and Active

Worlds (www.activeworlds.com). In these online

worlds personally designed avatars can roam, build,

interact or quest. Both have educational islands

(servers) from a large list of Universities and

Colleges who have bought space to build an

environment for their students to interact and learn

in. Another system commonly used is OpenSim

(http://opensimulator.org/) which is an open source

VW simulator. The University of St Andrews

School of Computer Science uses OpenSim to build

multiple environments for students such as the

Laconia Acropolis Project, St Andrews Cathedral

and Castle, Linlithgow Palace, Brora Site and a

Virtual Humanitarian Disaster (VHD) Simulation

(http://openvirtualworlds.org/). Some of these have

been built in conjunction with Scottish Heritage or

with other academic schools in the University such

as Archaeology or Management. The simulated

worlds are rich in visual and cognitive

entertainment. Users can wander through the worlds,

or as in the VHD, interact with constantly changing

scenarios.

Immersive environments cover a range of

environments where the cognitive awareness of a

user is altered by an artificial environment. The user

effectively suspends partial or complete belief,

enabling them to interact and react to stimuli in the

artificial world. This is applicable to chess players

being mentally immersed in their game, or to players

within a virtual environment cave, where they have a

total immersion within the world and their actions,

through tactical or sensory motor accoutrements

allow a complete sensation of being in that

environment. Users of Active Worlds, Second Life

or OpenSim have a narrative immersion when they

feel emotionally invested in the experience. They

may even progress to a form of spatial immersion

when the game play is projected or they feel so

convinced by the reality of the simulation that their

awareness is totally embedded within the

experience. Consequently we use the terms Virtual

Worlds as well as immersion as the simulations are

growing increasingly real to afford the user a sense

of being in-world.

Around the world, there are many users of

Second Life and Active World, latest estimates

suggest these are in the range of half a billion users.

The world online population, as of June 2012, is

2,405 million users with North America, Australia

and Europe with the highest online penetration of

over 60% each (http://internetworldstats.com). The

fastest growing regions are Asia, Africa, Middle

East and Latin America with online user growth

rates of circa 1000% over the last decade. Asia

currently has 27.5% of its population online but at

over 1,076 million people this demonstrates a vast

target for online educational support as well as

learning within games. It is therefore necessary to

summarise the types of use that researchers have

made of virtual worlds to enable an assessment of

the state of the art.

One of the driving forces of this work was the

knowledge that many students feel stressed when

arriving in a new University and a new country.

According to Smith & Khawaja (2011) acculturative

stressors include language barriers, educational

difficulties, loneliness and some basic practical

problems with finding themselves in a completely

new environment. The goals for students are to

achieve adaptation, socialisation and have an

awareness of the host country (Lord & Dawson,

2002). The OECD (2012) indicates that there are

now over 4 million international students worldwide

with over 52% from Asia. Since 2000 the number of

foreign tertiary students in OECD countries has

doubled. Consequently an attempt to reduce either

language or educational or socio-cultural stressors is

a valuable goal for any educational establishment.

2.1 A Virtual Educational Taxonomy

In a Virtual World Educational Taxonomy (Duncan

et al., 2012) the authors consider the primary level

differentiators to be the Who (Population), the What

(Educational Activity), the Why (Learning Theory),

the Where (Environment) and the How (Supporting

Technologies). A sixth category allows current and

active research to be noted.

The Population category demonstrates that

researchers have worked on VWs for a variety of

different age groups from primary school age

children up to Higher Education students. Also,

some worlds have been developed for physically

disabled users. Most of the published work to date

focuses on higher or further education.

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The Educational Activities category is rich in

diversity from problem based learning, role playing,

enquiry based learning, collaborative work, virtual

filed work or even simply attending classes in-

world. Myller et al (2009) presented an Engagement

Taxonomy which included simple viewing (of

information), as well as responding, changing,

constructing or presenting. This effectively reduces

to no engagement, passive engagement and active

engagement. Most of the activities in this category

fall into the active engagement category with users

constructing artefacts in-world or discovering

information and forming solutions. Collaborative

simulation and constructional activities comprised

over 70% of the reviewed literature here.

Learning Theories refers to the philosophy

behind the educational activity. Here we have

constructivist, experiential learning, collaborative,

experimental, instructional or didactive approaches

used with the most common being constructivist and

collaborative. It is noted here that Jestice and Kahai

(2010) suggested that virtual worlds can offer unique

experiences consistent with situated learning theory

in which learning happens within the applied context

and learning is active and acquired through

experience. Jarmon et al. (2009) concluded that

Second Life is an effective environment for a

project-based experiential learning approach because

of the connection between the real world and the in-

world tangible experience. Not surprisingly,

collaboration and experimental constructivism were

the dominant categories in the reviewed literature.

The Learning Environment category include the

Web 2.0 based Virtual Learning Environments

(VLEs) and Learning Management Systems (LMSs)

as well as the 3D web based technologies which

include virtual worlds.

The Supporting Technology category lists the

variety of technologies that are optional or required

within environments. These include Chat and Instant

Messaging (IM), audio, streaming technologies,

infrastructural aspects such as virtualisation or

networking requirements such as bandwidth and port

dedication. As far as the user is concerned the

communication aspects and visualisation and

rendering speeds are vital in aiding immersion.

Lastly, the Research Areas category

demonstrates that current researchers are not just

investigating appropriate educational strategies,

learning objectives and techniques, but are also

inquiring into how identity and embodiment and

even geo-spatial representation affects the user’s

immersion. Further challenges include

understanding social norms and interactions within

VWs and also how knowledge passing and co-

ordination of knowledge can be supportive. A

separate area of growing interest amongst linguists is

the use of virtual worlds to aid language learning in

a more contextual environment. However, a running

theme amongst most work is the problem of

evaluation and assessment. Most work reviewed was

descriptive from case studies and did not engage

with the assessment issues.

The Educational Taxonomy described above

informed the design and development of the virtual

world described in this paper. The original intent

was to build a VW useful for acculturation purposes,

an unusual learning or educational goal. Experiential

or exploratory learning was the key learning theory

considered at this stage. However, as the system was

developed and trialled, it was noted that the world

could be also be used for educational purposes such

as training within Masters level research methods

modules which cover a variety of topics taught at

repeated intervals to different groups of students

within the University. Consequently, the

Educational Activities, and the levels of

engagement, were passive learning through active

engagement with project based work, instructional

and collaborative scenario building. The Learning

Environment was the ViStA world, but the

Supporting Technologies were essentially basic

interaction and manipulation through a laptop or

personal computer. Our Population was primarily

postgraduate overseas students and our inital

Research Area was the investigation of what

overseas students would engage with for orientation

and induction, especially when those actual real-

world periods were time reduced in the university

calendar. Secondly we desired to investigate student

based learning and student directed learning, for

support purposes, around specific issues of concern

for overseas students.

2.2 Educational Issues in VWs

Whereas much current research is focussed on

experimental environments in which students have

tasks or activities to perform, several issues have

arisen from our experiences in the management of

these activities:

 Educators find it hard to monitor students

in-world without having a constant

presence which may negate student

discussion or alter behaviour.

 Without monitoring it is difficult to know

whether student work is truly collaborative

and whether all students are engaged and

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have their comments taken into account by

their peer group.

 Assessment and evaluation problems then

follow from the above. Formally written

student reports are often used to consider

their learning experiences but these are not

always a true reflection of what a student

has learned both academically and about

themselves from their experiences. More

reflection is required and appropriate

assessment and evaluation methods need to

be developed.

 How much contextual information or

directive information should be given to

students is an important facet of teaching

in-world. Essentially how much do

educators lead the student or is this another

element that must be layered as students

develop their own skill sets.

 Inclusion and accessibility is of importance

especially when dealing with non native

speakers or students new to VWs. If

instructions are in English or the use of

idioms is common, then again, we must be

aware of secondary problems posed by

working in an immersive, but essentially

foreign, environment for new students. We

should not add to their educational or social

stress factors.

These issues do not allow us to fully utilise the

power of immersive environments. Virtual Worlds

have great potential to reach a variety of students

and give them a self directed and essentially free

form mechanism to discover for themselves. If

educators can leverage the power of immersion

within VWs, students will gain benefit from doing

and understanding rather than listening. The current

work in virtual archaeological field work, visual

representations and interaction with algorithms,

biological models and the human body as well as

architectural models and police scene

reconstructions demonstrate the variety of uses of

VWs. However, if there are problems with

evaluation and assessment we run the risk of

allowing students to enjoy these worlds, without

correctly assessing their work. Feedback therefore

becomes problematical and grading is unlikely to be

accurate. A secondary issue here may be that the

types of (taught) modules which incorporate VWs

need to be peer assessed or report assessed, both of

which cause separate problems with accuracy or

peer transparency.

A further area that has not been well developed

so far are the use of these environments for either

language teaching such as TEFL or for learning

research methods. Both of these are important fields

for overseas students coming to study in the UK.

Apart from learning the language, students must

write reports and dissertations in (scientific) English,

and learn our systems of academic integrity,

laboratory practices, statistics etc. All of these are

stressful for the novice student.

2.3 Exploratory Learning in VWs

Overseas students, especially, must come to

understand the cultural and academic requirements

when studying abroad. No matter the country

overseas students decide to study in there will be

many stressful and acclimatisation situations ahead

of them in finding out travel information,

accommodation, matriculation, fees and visa

requirements let alone finding a suitable academic

school in which to study. These may not be directly

educational but orientation, and induction problems

affect a student’s ability to settle into academic

work. By developing a VW to allow a student to

engage with their prospective university in advance

of arrival, it is posited that the student is more

engaged, and more aware of important educational

and support information.

An aspect of this work is to investigate whether

students follow exploratory learning patterns of

asking questions (about relevant issues),

investigating further (URL usage, chat, email),

creating (scenarios or information for future student

usage), discussing (sharing ideas and knowledge)

and reflecting (through online histories of their time

in St Andrews). The initial user trials demonstrate

that students have followed the first four stages and

the latter two are under construction with current

projects. These have been driven by the students and

their own enquiries based on using the ViStA world

as an online orientation tool. The use of the world as

a TEFL environment or for supporting teaching will

now be a later phase of our continuing research and

we plan to monitor the learning patterns used.

The next section describes work in building the

virtual university with the primary aim of helping

overseas students through their orientation and

induction into a UK university. If only a few

students find that a virtual university delivers

appropriate contextual information and helps them,

and their families, understand the world in which

they are physically going to be part of, then the

virtual university has been a useful exercise.

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3 THE VIRTUAL ST ANDREWS

To gain entry to the ViStA world go to the URL:

http://openvirtualworlds.org/ViStA/register/ and

following registration one can download a viewer

before entering the virtual medieval St Salvator’s

Quad at the centre of the University.

ViStA was originally created as a Virtual World

orientation site for overseas students and has been

used and evaluated by current MLitt and MSc

students from the Arts and Science faculties. The

original research plan was to develop a safe and

welcoming environment for students considering or

intending to come to St Andrews to study with us.

Students would be able to peruse and interact with

the simulation of the university correctly placed

within the city of St Andrews. Students would

therefore feel familiarity with the geographical

layout of university buildings as well as discover

where key resources are physically placed.

One year postgraduate students have very little

time to be inducted, oriented and then embedded

into their course. They also have to settle into

residences and the social side of university life

before producing work at Masters level, quite

commonly in English as a second language. As a

university St Andrews has over 2000 overseas

students a year, nearly 1/3

of the student

population. Helping students understand the

geography of St Andrews as well as University

procedures such as matriculation and registering for

modules should allow students to be more aware of

their situation. Recent changes in the University

calendar also reduced time spent on orientation and

put extra stress on academic and support staff to

publish information in a short time frame. Therefore

we considered it a useful exercise to discover what

essential information both new students require to

know and also, what University staff need to impart,

to help new students through orientation. We

decided that a simulated version of St Andrews

would be a useful tool to impart knowledge and to

guide students through their new physical

environment. The use of virtual worlds and

interactive technologies allows students to get to

know the University, and possibly key staff or each

other, before arrival. Although this does not directly

impact onto teaching and learning, we expected a

positive response from students and therefore a

positive effect on learning from prior engagement

and a welcoming attitude from the University.

The research plan allowed us to develop

structured activities to encourage friendships and

contacts to ease the transition into UK Higher

Education student life. Current students were also

encouraged to participate by both entering the world

to chat to visitors as well as develop their own

(virtual) areas and interests in-world.

3.1 Work Packages

The initial plan was to achieve key outcomes from

the initial build time of six months. There were four

main work packages, see Table 1, and the project

was managed by weekly meetings to determine short

term goals.

In Work Package One we concentrated on

building a virtual world geographically identical to

one of the oldest parts of the University; St

Salvator’s Quad and the Chapel and School

buildings that surround the quad today. The area was

extended to include the Student Accommodation

Office and the Advice and Support Centre, the ASC,

Table 1: ViStA Work Packages.

WP 1 ViStA Build: Generate the prototype world

in OpenSim concentrating on the oldest parts

of the University and key student services.

WP2 Orientation: Interview key staff and build

scenarios and interactive avatars to

demonstrate services.

WP3 Technical Storage & Virtualisation: ensure

that the system can take many visitors

concurrently.

WP4 Evaluation: Test the system using current

students and staff and feedback information

into the system.

which is frequently used by prospective and current

students and was therefore considered vital to the

virtual world.On arrival inside ViStA, a student’s

avatar is centred in the Quad. Currently the Schools

building and the College Halls that are sited on two

sides of the Quad (see Figure 1) have rooms in

which students can read posters with static and

dynamic information embedded in them, or view

short videos that are sited in picture frames of

University life in St Andrews. These videos are a

mix of official University videos and student made

ones from their Bubble TV student society. In a later

version of ViStA the lecture theatres and rooms will

be exact in details to reality but for this prototype

version we kept the physical facades of the buildings

accurate but kept the space inside as one large room

to enable multiple avatars to mingle.

Work Package two was concerned with

interviewing key staff and current students to

discover the information they considered vital to any

new student arriving in the city. Although these are

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only at an early stage of development, as befits a

prototype, we will be building more scenarios and

interactive displays and in-world content over the

coming months as our Honours and Masters students

develop more in-world content during their project

and dissertation phases.

Work Package Three was the technical support

for ViSta, and other worlds, ensuring that enough

computational resources were available to enable

multiple visitors to be in-world at the same time.

ViStA has worked well with up to 20 avatars active

in-world but a trial in early Spring 2013 is scheduled

to test the system with many more concurrent users.

Figure 1: Inside the Quad facing the College Halls (ahead)

and the Schools buildings (right).

Work Package Four has already taken place after

the initial, primary build. Students from both MLitt

(Arts) and MSc (Science) courses were asked to test

the system in its prototype state and to give

feedback. We were encouraged by the interest of

many students who wanted to build constructs and

scenarios as part of their research dissertations.

These work packages were designed to allow us

to grow the immersive environment and to allow

domain specialists to submit information for upload

to the environment. Information about University

facilities such as Accommodation, Library, ELT

services, IT services and academic school

information could be linked to via in-world posters

or leaflets with embedded links or static information.

Similarly avatars could “carry” information allowing

visitors to read information when close to an avatar.

For example, a student representative avatar wearing

the bright red undergraduate gown could hold

information on where a visiting student may wish to

find information.

3.2 Challenges

As with many projects scheduled to last a few

months, much time was lost in discovering who in

the University held information about particular

processes or who had the right to allow us access to

videos or film in accommodation blocks. However,

as the project is planned to grow organically over the

next few years, then the lateness of some

information was considered non essential to the

success of the initial project.

As we advertised the virtual world within the

University we discovered that several units were

keen to add to our environment; the Advice and

Support Centre were keen to advertise their facilities

and support and to offset their massive workload in

the early weeks of a new academic year and the

English Language support services were keen to

develop avatar scenarios and interaction for

language practice. Further, commercial

organisations in the city of St Andrews, a small city

of around 16,000 population, offered images of store

fronts and lists of available wares to add to the

information content of ViStA. We installed URLs to

commercial organisations in their shop fronts so that

the information was dynamic and devolved to the

commercial organisation.

The level of immersion offered in our prototype

version was low; students did not wear game wear

such as helmets or gloves. Only auditory queues

were available along with chat mechanisms. The

system was similar to Second Life wherein avatars

can move around by walking or flying and could

interact by chatting. One of the many research

questions that we hope to consider in future

experiments is the level of immersion required by

students before a benefit is measurable. Many

institutions will not wish to engage in expensive

interaction equipment when, or if, students are

willing to suspend belief or engage with learning at a

lower level of an immersive environment.

3.2.1 Information Management

Management of information was one of our major

concerns and it was important that we devolved the

information back to the original sources by

embedding URL links to web pages as much as

possible. Some information was static but we

decided that any frequently updateable information

was best updated by the original source so that

visitors were getting the latest updated information,

such as train times or cost of accommodation. Local

dissemination of information was therefore

important to gain buy-in from the University and

from city organisations that students would

frequently use such as transport companies.

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3.2.2 Language Support

The original plan for ViStA was to aid overseas

students’ orientation so that they would engage

with University work earlier and with less stress.

Consequently multiple language information and

interaction was a major consideration of our work.

We originally planned to have in-world information

in multiple languages but decided that, as the

purpose was to help students orientate in a UK

university, it would be appropriate to keep the main

information in English. However, we also decided

that it would be appropriate for some information to

be offered in alternative languages, and what

information this is and how it is to displayed is to be

researched by students over their 2013 summer

dissertations. Effectively we would have a multi-

layered environment in which information could be

transformed into Mandarin or Hindi if current

students deem that to be necessary. Chat rooms for

specific languages have been planned in the next

iteration.

3.2.3 Sustainability

Essentially we see ViStA as student centred

development for students and consequently the

project itself should be self sustaining. As students

enter the world and desire more interactivity or more

language dependent information, then they can

provide that functionality or resource for future

students. For example, using interactive avatars to

talk in a non English language was too complicated

to be developed in the first prototype but this has

been offered as a summer project for interested

students to develop.

As the prototype demonstrates successful

interaction as measured by structured interviews,

questionnaires or user logs then more interaction and

activities can be developed and the project should

improve via student led development, subject to our

analysis and evaluation. The project should have a

direct effect on student activities and stress levels in

the pre-sessional periods, staff- student relations and

student socialisation.

3.3 Evaluation

Evaluation forms were given to two sets of students

(Arts & Sciences) after a one hour ViStA taster

session. Overall there were just over 30 students.

The questionnaire is available online.

Most students felt they would not use the system

very frequently after arrival at the University (with

the system as it currently is) but they found the

system easy to use and felt confident using it. They

felt they knew more about the University and

wanted to know more about St Andrews once they

had been in-world. They found information easily

and wanted to chat to more current students, but they

were not keen on attending virtual lectures and there

was a mix of responses for wishing to talk to staff

in-world.

With the free form answers, students said they

were pleased to find out more about the history and

culture within the University and about Scotland and

were fascinated by the 3D effects of the virtual

world. They wanted to explore more of the town and

University than is currently available. Some

interesting points that were raised included the

desire for students to see accommodation and

transport systems. Whereas we had concentrated on

the University as an entity with physical buildings,

geographical correctness, history and basic facts,

students wanted to know more about how to get to

St Andrews, the cost of living and travel and what

accommodation was offered.

The student questionnaire results also

demonstrated an interesting facet about VWs. We

call this the “Marmite Effect”. Most students

appeared to be fully engaged and liked the idea of a

VW, wanting to be more involved as regards

content, scenarios and even managing the project. A

smaller but substantial group, about 1/3

of the

initial cohorts questioned, did not see any benefit of

the ViStA environment. They considered the

University’s own web pages to be sufficient along

with Google maps to discover the university’s

environs. The second group appeared to find no

benefit in perceiving the University in-world,

meeting staff and students and interacting. It was

posited that this may be due to immersion factors,

the lack of game wear, of the simplicity of

interactions currently available (until Summer 2013)

in-world. It may be that some students simply prefer

their own mechanisms for finding out information

and therefore, as with all educational support tools,

the usage should be an aid to those who want it and

not enforced in any way.

4 CONCLUSIONS

ViStA was set up initially for overseas students to

help them through a short orientation and induction

period. Essentially our virtual world became a cross-

university educational and support system. Students

were engaged with the world and wanted to develop

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more activities, buildings and interactions whereas

staff wanted to deposit more links to information.

Furthermore, staff and students both wanted to use

the world for social activities, from advertising balls,

sports of musical events to simply dropping into a

room to have a chat with another member of staff.

Although it was originally posited that students

would be keen to find out about a University’s

traditions, life-style and ethos, as well as necessary

procedures such as matriculation and financial it was

discovered that, pre-arrival, overseas students were

mainly worried about accommodation and travel.

Overseas students tended to hear about ancient

universities through news reports or historical

programs about which famous people attended the

University. Online information tells the prospective

student in general terms about the University and its

research status, but students really want to know

about non-academic issues such as travel to the City,

accommodation and University social life.

Consequently, we realised that it is important to

listen to what students actually want, including the

perspectives of EU and overseas students as well as

UK national students.

The major recommendation that comes out of

this project, so far, is that more time be given to a

project of this nature; where there is a technical

build and information gathering phases followed by

evaluation. Although most of what was planned was

completed, the timescale of the project has not been

conducive to finessing our scenarios or extending

our information base. Neither have we achieved the

language aspects that will be the focus of the next

research phase of our work. However, as a

prototype, the project has most definitely been a

success in terms of interest from the University and

from students who wish to participate for the benefit

of future students.

As John Stuart Mill stated in his Inaugural

Address to St Andrews in 1865 when installed as

Rector, “What an utter failure a system of education

must be, if it has not given the pupil a sufficient taste

for reading to seek for himself those most attractive

and easily intelligible of all kinds of knowledge.”

We have posited that by allowing students to self

learn in a restricted but organic immersive

environment, we have encouraged self learning and

awareness through social interaction and knowledge

exchange. This may not be Mill’s vision of reading

but it is a major form of knowledge gathering for

today’s students.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We thank the UK Higher Education Academy

(HEA) for granting us funds to start the development

of the ViStA project.

There are several people involved in the

development of ViStA including the two main

developers; Iain Oliver who worked on the

networking, system support and interactivity side

and Sarah Kennedy who was directly responsible for

building the content of the world. Carys Adamson of

ELT helped with support and content and Yaning

Du did interviews and constructed in-world content.

We also wish to thank the Masters students in ELT

and the School of Computer Science.

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Lord, P. & Dawson, C. 2002. The Induction Needs of

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Extending the Engagement Taxonomony: Software

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Smith, R.A. & Khawaja, N.G., 2011. A Review of the

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International Journal of Intercultural Relations 35

(2011) 699-713

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