TEACHING LARGE STUDENT COHORTS IN SECOND LIFE

Scalability Issues and Student Satisfaction in a Virtual World

Marc Conrad, David Pike, Paul Sant and Catherine Nwafor

Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Bedfordshire, Park Square, Luton, U.K.

Keywords:

Second Life, Virtual Worlds, Student Activities.

Abstract:

There are high expectations on Second Life, a multi-user interactive virtual environment, to play a prominent

role in higher education in the future. Across universities worldwide many projects aim to engage students

in a variety of activities related to Second Life. However typically the number of students participating in

those projects is small and the use of Second Life is an optional addition to the syllabus. We present two

activities, conducted in 2007 and 2008 where Second Life has been used as an integral, non voluntarily part

of an assignment in project management. Feedback from the 200 participants has been collected in the form

of a questionnaire and interviews. Our results show that students have found the experience mostly positive,

or, at least, didn’t object to it. However technical and administrative problems have been identiﬁed that still

question the suitability of Second Life for a smooth provision of these activities on a large scale.

1 INTRODUCTION

Second Life (Linden Lab, 2003) is an online three

dimensional virtual world with an advanced way of

building, interaction, socialization, communication,

collaboration and networking. Businesses and insti-

tutions of various backgrounds such as IBM, Toyota,

Reuters, BBC or Adidas enjoy a virtual presence in

Second Life (Salomon, 2007). At the time of writing

(November 2008) Second Life statistics records over

1,000,000 users “logged in last 60 days” and more

than 60,000 users “online now”. In the educational

sector it is often seen as a modern method of teach-

ing and learning online. The huge expectations on

Second Life as an educational tool manifests itself in

statements such as “As students expectations rise, ed-

ucational institutions will have to ﬁnd ways of pro-

viding a mass-customised service, and virtual world

technologies provide a cost-effective way of providing

individualised support in a superior way to the cur-

rent Web 2.0 platforms such as Blackboard or Moo-

dle.” (Kingsley, 2007)

However current studies of student behavior in

Second Life are pilots with small student cohorts

(Sanchez, 2007; Ritzema and Harris, 2008) and of-

ten optional in the student’s course diet. In contrast

our study seeks to answer the question of how such

activities scale to large student cohorts in a situation

where Second Life constitutes a mandatory and inte-

gral assessment part of the module syllabus.

In doing so we not only question the validity of the

statement quoted above but also are able to demon-

strate the problems arising with scaling Second Life

to large cohorts. The result could be summarized as

follows. While students are indeed willing and ready

to accept the inclusion of Second Life as part of their

learning experience, the technical underpinnings of

Second Life itself need to improve before we can ex-

pect its widespread use in teaching.

The paper is organized as follows. First we give an

overview about the virtual presence of the University

of Bedfordshire where this study has been carried out

and put this into the wider context of educational ac-

tivities in Second Life. This is followed in Section 3

by a description of the tasks given to the students. In

total 200 students have been “sent” to Second Life.

Evidence of their experience has been gathered via a

questionnaire and interviews in addition to anecdotal

observations. This evidence is presented in Section 4

followed by the conclusions in Section 5.

Conrad M., Pike D., Sant P. and Nwafor C. (2009).

TEACHING LARGE STUDENT COHORTS IN SECOND LIFE - Scalability Issues and Student Satisfaction in a Virtual World.

In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Computer Supported Education, pages 10-17

DOI: 10.5220/0001846800100017

 SciTePress

2 UNIVERSITIES IN SECOND

LIFE

Second Life is an online virtual environment offer-

ing opportunities for interaction between many dif-

ferent sections of the world-wide community. There

are several different types of activities that can be un-

dertaken within the Second Life “grid”: interacting

with other users (known as avatars), buying and sell-

ing objects such as clothing, participating in or at-

tending live events. Utilizing Second Life and tak-

ing on the role of an avatar is free. Therefore from

an educator’s point of view, it is possible to discover

areas where opportunities for students’ development

can take place. Many educational establishments and

commercial bodies have a presence within Second

Life and it is clearly becoming a point of interest for

the larger web-community.

Activities in the UK are well documented (Kir-

riemuir, 2008) and show a great variety: Projects

range from small student driven projects up to large

developments across nine Second Life “islands”.

Many universities have externally funded research

projects in Second Life. Casually browsing the In-

ternet and Second Life itself suggests many similar

activities from universities all over the world.

(Ritzema and Harris, 2008) attempted to evalu-

ate the use of Second Life as a tool for facilitating

distance learning. The team rebuilt real life exam-

ples from a computing laboratory in the Second Life

grid for students to experiment with. The group in

this case was relatively small (fourteen individuals),

but the feedback was extremely positive and indicated

that many of the students found that the online activ-

ity enabled them to better understand the laboratory

work.

(Sanchez, 2007) reports on the social and techni-

cal issues in the context of a student activity involving

a focus group of eighteen students. There the picture

is less positive and a number of both social and tech-

nical issues are highlighted.

Anecdotal experience gathered from various per-

sonal discussions with educators in Second Life

seems to indicate that typically the use of Second Life

at universities is an initiative of a small number of in-

dividuals, usually teachers, that in addition to their

teaching activities (in the context of their Second Life

activities) assume the roles of technical and admin-

istrative support. Often the use of that “game” in

teaching is merely tolerated by senior administrative

management and (in the best case) not been hindered

by technical support. This is reminiscent to the early

days of the Internet where educators who wanted to

make their teaching material available electronically

had to adopt the additional role of their own web mas-

ter.

The situation at the University of Bedfordshire

is much better. Land in Second Life has been ac-

quired by the Teaching & Learning Support Depart-

ment and championed by the technical support. In-

novative teaching using Second Life is explicitly en-

couraged. We are going to show however that even in

such a seemingly optimal environmental and organi-

zational context the use of Second Life as a manda-

tory part of a student assignment is not without prob-

lems. Evidence has been gathered from two assign-

ments involving 200 students in total. While the stu-

dents’ feedback is generally positive, technical difﬁ-

culties that arise from the inherent workings of Sec-

ond Life itself prevail, or to put it more bluntly: While

students are ready for an assignment of that style, Sec-

ond Life itself is not (yet).

We want however add a caveat: Second Life pro-

vides a whole plethora of opportunities for universi-

ties. This paper is not meant to question such activi-

ties in principle. In particular it may well be suitable

for individual projects of creative and interested stu-

dents in areas such as art, psychology, computer sci-

ence or architecture. However the scalability of such

projects to a large cohort of students that a priori can-

not be assumed to have any speciﬁc aptitude towards

virtual environments is questioned here.

3 THE TASKS ASSIGNED TO THE

STUDENTS

3.1 Context of the Assignment

Figure 1: View over Bedfordia (front) and the University of

Bedfordshire (back) in Second Life.

The location of the student activities that we are go-

ing to describe in the following sections took place

at the island “Bedfordia” owned by the department of

Teaching and Learning of the University of Bedford-

CSEDU 2009 - International Conference on Computer Supported Education

shire, For clarity it should be noted that the university

also owns a second adjacent island named “University

of Bedfordshire” which is primarily used for market-

ing purposes. In particular while the “University of

Bedfordshire” island has been designed to give a look

and feel of the real university by featuring character-

istic university buildings such as a library or student

union, the island of Bedfordia has been landscaped

by a skilled builder to stimulate creative activities. It

features atmospheric structures such as lakes, wood-

lands, a tree house and a swimming pool (Figure 1).

The Teaching and Learning island Bedfordia has a

size of 32560 sq. m. For the assignment an area

of about 5632 sq. m. has been made available as a

building area - ”sandbox” - for the students. The use

of Second Life has been championed as well by the

university’s Information Systems Department so that

there have been no principal issues to be resolved con-

cerning ﬁrewalls, blocked ports or Second Life client

installations on student machines (difﬁculties that are

often encountered at other universities). In summary

it can be said that the environmental and technical

conditions have been optimal to run the learning ac-

tivities described in the next section.

3.2 Pilot Activity, Autumn 2007

In 2007 the provision of the Second Life island by

the University of Bedfordshire was brought to the at-

tention to the teaching team of the undergraduate 3rd

year module “IT Project Management”. At that time

Second Life has been accessible from inside the uni-

versity via client installations in a lab specialized in

computer graphics. Given this availability a decision

was made to pilot the use of Second Life to a larger

cohort of students. In that module 84 students were

enrolled.

In previous years the assessment of the project

management module already contained an element

that focuses on team cohesion and human interac-

tion. Students were randomly assigned into teams and

given access to a team-owned discussion board. The

core task for the students was to organize social meet-

ings in order to ”improve the team coherence”. The

marks were based on the students evaluation of those

meetings. For more details (without the Second Life

context) please see (Conrad et al., 2006) where the as-

signment and learning outcomes are presented and the

relevance to cultural proﬁles of teams is discussed.

In 2007 this activity has been altered by requiring

the students to meet virtually in Second Life. Be-

cause introducing students to the speciﬁc demands

of “virtual teams” has already been part of the syl-

labus in previous years the use of Second Life would

blend in naturally. The students were given the fol-

lowing case study (in the following all emphasized

text denotes a direct quotation from the assignment

sheet the students received): “BedTime Books Ltd

wants to set up a (virtual) branch in Second Life

(see http://secondlife.com ). BedTime Books’ branch

should be located near the University of Bedfordshire

at the island Bedfordia. Your company has no previ-

ous experience with virtual worlds. For this project

BedTime Books has assigned you to a project team of

7 or 8 people. As the team members come from dif-

ferent locations [. . . ] a group discussion board has

been set up [. . . ] to enhance communication.” The

notion of ”different locations” has been simulated by

sourcing the groups from different practical sessions

meaning that there was a priori no default time slot

in the week where students can meet either virtually

or really. This must be negotiated within the student

group. The students had to work against the following

two goals:

• To form a coherent team that could actually start

with building the branch [. . . ].

• To familiarize all team members with the virtual

environment provided by Second Life, and in par-

ticular the island Bedfordia.

The meeting had to be evidenced by providing a

screenshot and the whole process had later to be eval-

uated in an individual report. The activity concluded

with the following note: “No particular help will be

given from the tutors on how to use and interact with

Second Life. To identify suitable resources such as

tutorials is part of the task of the project team.” As

Second Life is designed in a way that it is usable

by the general public and even more because the stu-

dents have been enrolled in computing related degrees

where an afﬁnity towards the use of software can be

assumed this approach seemed feasible. As a matter

of fact the validity of the remark has not been ques-

tioned by any of the students.

The activity is essentially designed as an indi-

vidual assessment in so far that marks are primarily

not given on the group performance as a whole but

rather based on the individual students’ interactions

and their reﬂection on those in the ﬁnal report. A

template for this report has been provided and we in-

cluded an evaluative questionnaire on the experience

of the students in Second Life. While the answers

of this evaluation questionnaire have not been consid-

ered to be relevant for the students’ grade they nev-

ertheless allowed to gather the quantitative and qual-

itative feedback that informed the use of Second Life

in the next assignment described in Section 3.3. For

details on the results of this questionnaire see Sec-

TEACHING LARGE STUDENT COHORTS IN SECOND LIFE - Scalability Issues and Student Satisfaction in a Virtual

World

tion 4.3. From the 84 students enrolled in this activity

around ﬁfty ﬁlled in the questionnaire.

The assignment helped to get an initial feeling

about what it means to use Second Life as a tool in

teaching and assessing students. In addition it helped

to sort out some teething problems in deploying the

necessary Second Life client software as a default ap-

plication on the workstations so that it is accessible

by the students.

3.3 Building of a Showcase

(Professional Project Management)

Inspired by the positive experience in autumn 2007

as described in the previous section a decision was

made to include Second Life in the assessment pro-

cess of the postgraduate module “Professional Project

Management” that run in spring 2008. In this module

114 students have been enrolled. The focus of this

assessment is the successful application of a project

management processes within a real-world environ-

ment. More speciﬁcally the following learning out-

comes have been addressed in this activity:

• To understand the importance of team coherence

in a professional (team based) project

• To clearly communicate in a variety of media at

an advanced academic level

• To develop Key Skills in the areas of Performance

Management and Presentation and Evaluation

• To apply a project management methodology

within a real-world context.

At the start of the assignment students have been

pre-assigned into teams of 4-6 people. It should be

noted that this module is part of the syllabus of var-

ious different postgraduate awards in Computing at

the University of Bedfordshire. As far as possible the

teams have been assigned in a way so that all students

in any particular team share the same award. This

should provide a common basis to work on the project

mandate that was described as follows (quote from the

assignment sheet):

“You have been asked to work in a group of IT

specialists to develop a set of products that can be

used to educate the general public about your spe-

cialist area, e.g., Networking students will educate

the general public on wireless and mobile networks;

Computer Scientists will educate the general public

on pervasive computing, and how computing is be-

coming an integral part of our lives; Generalists will

educate the general public on the increasing use of

E-commerce, and the security implications that this

has.”

Then the set of products to be developed is further

described:

• “Poster [. . . ]

• A wiki page [. . . ]

• A Second Life showcase that would serve to raise

the awareness of visitors of the virtual Univer-

sity of Bedfordshire to essential issues regarding

your specialist area. This showcase will be pre-

sented to the Programme/Corporate Management

(i.e. the module tutors) but should be designed

and build in a way that it is accessible to the gen-

eral public.”

The assignment sheet than ﬁnally gave further di-

rection on the processes to be used. Concerning Sec-

ond Life the following paragraph was added:

“Second Life is accessible from the CIS labs (or,

of course, from home). You have to register an ac-

count with Linden Labs at www.secondlife.com. No

particular help will be given from the tutors on how

to use and interact with Second Life. To identify suit-

able resources such as tutorials is part of the task of

the project team and must hence be included in the

project brief. A dedicated space to build up the Sec-

ond Life showcase will be provided [...]. Please en-

sure to produce regular screenshots in order to docu-

ment the progress of the project.

Figure 2: Students working on the assignment in Second

Life.

Evidence on how this assignment has been per-

ceived has been gathered by interviews with the stu-

dents at the end of the course.

We want to point out here that Second Life has

been introduced to the students as a platform for pro-

ductivity and not as a means to communicate with

each other remotely or as a place to have virtual meet-

ings. Those features though have been mentioned as

side effects in the lectures and practical sessions.

CSEDU 2009 - International Conference on Computer Supported Education

4 FEEDBACK FROM THE

ACTIVITIES

4.1 Anecdotal Observations

We start our discussion on feedback with reporting

some of the students’ reactions made at the beginning

of the assignment or shortly after.

• Only one student of the second cohort challenged

the tutor in questioning the use of Second Life in

principle. Those concerns could be addressed by

pointing out the relevance of virtual teams in lo-

cally distributed real life projects and also in hint-

ing that Second Life is not a game but a social

platform that is used for education also by other

institutions throughout the UK and worldwide.

• Some students had difﬁculties with the term

”showcase” used in the assignment. This has been

addressed by reference to showcases of compa-

nies and other institutions in Second Life. As it

was intended to give the project teams ownership

in making their own design decisions it was ab-

stained from giving step-by-step details on what

should constitute an acceptable end result.

• The intention that no help was to be provided

by the tutors was overoptimistic to say the least.

While that approach was feasible in the much

simpler undergraduate assignment as described in

Section 3.2 it was felt that most students found

the task to actually build in Second Life very chal-

lenging. Hence it was decided to start one of the

lectures with a short ﬁfteen minute long demon-

stration on how to actually build a simple poster

in Second Life by starting with a slide in Power-

Point (saving the PowerPoint slide as png-ﬁle, up-

loading the ﬁle and applying the texture to a prim

in Second Life). Actual building of the students

in Second Life then started essentially after that

demonstration. In addition some useful building

tools have been provided in-world for the students

to work with and individual help was given by the

tutors (see below).

• Once students had completed the process of reg-

istering an avatar on Second Life they were re-

quired to send an instant message to an assigned

member of staff so the student could be placed in a

group with appropriate access to build and create

objects. It was then decided to provide a minimal

level of instruction for the students as we consid-

ered this to be an important part of each individ-

ual project’s development. Tutors spent time with

the students explaining the nature and abilities to

manipulate objects in Second Life within the Uni-

versity’s sandbox area. One of the voluntary res-

idents on the Bedfordia island provided students

with links to other areas and to textures and ob-

jects within Second Life.

4.2 Questionnaire Evaluation of the

Pilot Activity

The following questionnaire has been distributed to

the students after the activity:

In the second part of the assignment you have

been asked to use Second Life. To help us to under-

stand your experience with this new format better we

would like you to answer the following questions.

1. On a scale of 1 (easiest) to 5 (hardest) how easy

did you ﬁnd it to to get into Second Life?

2. What things were difﬁcult (if anything) about get-

ting IN to Second Life?

3. On a scale of 1 (easiest) to 5 (hardest) - how easy

did you ﬁnd it to get to Bedfordia?

4. What things were difﬁcult about getting to Bedfor-

dia?

5. What was your opinion of Bedfordia?

6. In what ways did you ﬁnd Second Life useful for

the task you were set, i.e. to have a project meet-

ing?

7. In what ways do you think Second Life as a learn-

ing tool is different from BREO? [The university’s

Blackboard based content management system]

8. In what ways do you think Second Life could be

used to support your learning?

From a cohort of 84 students 50 responses have been

received. Note that only questions one and three give

quantitative results while the other questions are of

qualitative character. In question one for 80% of the

respondents getting into Second Life was easy or neu-

tral 20% found it hard. The problems encountered by

those 20% are about installing Second Life at home

(which was not a requirement) or difﬁculties to regis-

ter.

For question 3 only 3% of the students found it

hard to ﬁnd the island of Bedfordia (the student’s

home location) in Second Life. Those problems were

not substantial and could be easily resolved by asking

a tutor or friends (question 4).

The impression students got from the island Bed-

fordia (question 5) was overwhelmingly positive. Stu-

dents commented with words like “exciting”, “well

designed”, “interesting” or “pleasant”. It seems here

that the fact that the island has been landscaped by

TEACHING LARGE STUDENT COHORTS IN SECOND LIFE - Scalability Issues and Student Satisfaction in a Virtual

World

a skilled Second Life builder has been paid off. It

is our feeling that professional landscaping is a non-

negligible factor when designing an ofﬁcial presence

in Second Life. It facilitates students to accept the vir-

tual world as “theirs”, as a professional service of the

university designed to enhance their teaching.

Question 6 “In what ways did you ﬁnd Second Life

useful for the task you were set, i.e. to have a project

meeting?” suggests a more subtle picture. Many re-

marks were enthusiastic, however for reasons that are

essentially generic to any software that supports vir-

tual meetings. One of the critical answers put it to

the point: “I could see nothing that Second Life did

that an instant messenger could not.”, or similarly

“Since there are many communication softwares on

the market, in my opinion for a virtual project meet-

ing I would choose another software. [. . . ]”. Still, the

majority was willing to freely assume the usefulness

of Second Life as a proper tool for virtual meetings.

It seems odd that the obvious overhead like register-

ing, creating an avatar and learning basic moves has

largely not been seen as an obstacle by most of the

respondents. It may also be surprising that not a sin-

gle response somehow addresses the issues that one’s

identity in Second Life is presented by an avatar and

that a meeting by such proxy-identities might be per-

ceived somehow differently then a (virtual) meeting

where participants identify themselves by their real

name.

Question 7 evaluates the student’s perception of

Second Life as a learning tool. In particular it has

been asked to compare Second Life to the univer-

sity’s Blackboard type content management system.

Many differences have been highlighted such as “Sec-

ond Life is more interactive” or “Second Life is a real

time experience and is fun” and virtually no similar-

ities have been identiﬁed by any of the students. The

response “Personally I wouldn’t call it as a learning

tool, but more of virtual excitement game.” is an ex-

ample typical to many of the student responses. This

is interesting in view of the statement we quoted in the

introduction “[. . . ] virtual world technologies pro-

vide a [. . . ] support in a superior way to the current

Web 2.0 platforms such as Blackboard or Moodle.”

(Kingsley, 2007). If this were truly the case, wouldn’t

we expect that at least some of those who now had

experience in both Blackboard and Second Life see

some potential there?

Finally, Question 8 asks how Second Life would

enhance one’s learning experience. Here the answers

are rather negatives “can’t think of any way in which

it may be used to support my learning.” and similarly

“Not useful because you can only use it for discus-

sions and getting to know purposes, and not learning

lecture notes for example.”. If at all, the usefulness of

Second Life as a meeting tool has been highlighted,

essentially in reference to answers given already to

Question 6.

In summary the questionnaire suggests a certain

openness towards the use of Second Life in general.

In particular there were hardly any difﬁculties with

the enrollment process or any issues with the concept

of having an avatar in Second Life as part of an as-

sessment task. Students in general felt positive about

the island of Bedfordia and how it was built. However

the answers to questions 7 and 8 made it painstakingly

clear that they didn’t see any relevant connection be-

tween Second Life and an electronic learning plat-

forms such as Blackboard. The perception seemed

rather that of a “game” that added some interesting

colour to their teaching experience.

4.3 Interview Results from the Building

Activity

Feedback from the second activity that required the

actual built of structures in Second Life (see Sec-

tion 3.3) has been gathered by conducting interviews.

In each interview session approximately ten students

took part and a recording device has been used to pro-

vide transcripts of the interviews. We structure the

following sections around the main topics that have

been addressed during those interviews.

4.3.1 Students Getting Signed up to Second Life

Most of the students had little difﬁculty signing up to

Second Life: However this operation appeared to oc-

cur continuously throughout the activity. First, many

of the groups assigned one or two persons to be re-

sponsible for the development of their group’s show-

case within the island. Towards the end of the project

many of the other group members decided that they

wanted to review the progress personally (i.e. with

their own avatar within Second Life), or to in some

way aid the development of the showcase. This sud-

den rush which coincided with the nearing project

submission date caused issues with our ability to re-

spond. At one point over 40 instant messages have

been received in one day and considerable time was

spent trying to deal with “confused” students who

wanted to build a showcase, but clearly were not

aware that their fellow group members had already

built substantial structures.

CSEDU 2009 - International Conference on Computer Supported Education

Figure 3: Instructions given to students where to ﬁnd the

building place.

4.3.2 Instant Messaging, but Instead Adding as

a Friend

Our students had problems using the Second Life in-

terface to send instant messages. Initial instructions

indicated that students would need to message a mem-

ber of staff (Figure 3). However many of the students

thought that to send an instant message they needed

to be friends with the staff member. Friend requests

formed a substantial part of the trafﬁc sent to the in-

box of staff.

4.3.3 Students Navigating around Second Life

Many of the students found the initial orientation is-

land useful but a little confusing. The comments we

received seemed to suggest that students would need

much support in the way of building and learning how

to build items within Second Life. However most

were able to operate within the environment without

too many problems.

4.3.4 Finding Space to Build and ’prim’ Space

Availability

Many of the students had problems with ﬁnding an

area to build within the designated area. Most of these

issues stemmed from students arriving very close to

the submission deadlines to build their showcases. We

had to make suggestions and in some cases changes

to more capacious structures. Some groups elected to

build skyboxes to ensure that they would not interfere

with spaces closer to the ground. Towards the sub-

mission date we also found that the space on the is-

land had run out of prim space (“prims” are the small-

est building units that can be used to set up structures

within Second Life. Essentially the number of prims

that can be used on any given land is limited). Extra

space had to be added.

Rather fascinatingly students perceived that their

showcase buildings needed items like roofs, stairs

and even chairs. During interviews it transpired that

students thought the buildings needed to “look like

proper buildings” otherwise they would not get marks

for their project. We took opportunities to question

students about the addition of items such as chairs,

and in one case a coffee maker, it appeared that the

students wanted to create a truly personalized experi-

ence for those visiting the showcase.

4.3.5 Miscellaneous Issues

Aside from the main issues addressed in the previous

sections feedback also included the ability to under-

take project meetings regardless of geographical lo-

cation, the potential for creativity and use of imagi-

nation, and the contrast to other projects. Consider-

ations over appearance include appropriate dress and

indicates that students typically identiﬁed themselves

with their avatar: “ ‘Furies and animal avatars’ are

weird - people should be dressed in their own gen-

der”. Some beneﬁts were suggested in relation to an

international audience: “If people from different cul-

tures and background wanted to work together Sec-

ond Life would provide an excellent tool. In real life

you have to be able to understand others’ accents

etc. Second Life has text chat which makes this pro-

cess easier.” Students had difﬁculties with some typ-

ical Second Life efforts such as learning to build and

upload objects and textures, object number limits on

Bedfordia, and obtaining the local in-world currency

(“Linden Dollars”).

Use of Second Life does not avoid the familiar

group project difﬁculties - motivating group members

(to build), and trying to better understand the require-

ments of the project. On the whole the efforts run at

Bedfordia have been well-received by the students.

4.4 Administrative and Technical Issues

In this section we highlight some issues that have been

identiﬁed by the educators complimentary to student

feedback.

• Usability issues: To make a build it was neces-

sary to enrol students in a Second Life group, the

instructions as shown in Figure 3 have been dis-

tributed to the students. This enrollment proce-

dure has been felt to be too time consuming. For

further activities a process to streamline access of

student groups to land in Second Life needs to be

identiﬁed.

• Student guidance: Students needed more guid-

ance then expected. Although Second Life is full

TEACHING LARGE STUDENT COHORTS IN SECOND LIFE - Scalability Issues and Student Satisfaction in a Virtual

World

of structures set up by non-IT professionals and

hence postgraduate students in computing degree

could be expected to acquire the necessary skills

and knowledge themselves, it quickly turned out

that some basic guidance needed to be provided.

• Updates: Second Life requires frequent updates of

the client software. As student accounts are typi-

cally limited and the update requires administrator

rights, this regular procedure implied a consider-

able additional workload to technical staff.

• Backups: The assessment process heavily de-

pends on the availability of Second Life being ac-

cessible in a stable and reliable way. Hence there

is an inherent risk of data loss, essentially not con-

trollable by the university, that might have spoiled

the structures set up by the students. It has been

tried to safeguard against such an incident by reg-

ular in-world visits of the tutor. During those vis-

its screenshots have been made to document stu-

dent progress. Luckily no such incident occurred.

5 CONCLUSIONS

The students found the experience mostly positive or

were at least neutral. Even students without an ap-

titude towards virtual worlds or “computer games”

developed a sense of professional identity with their

avatars. The production of a showcase provided them

with a sense of ownership and achievement. Learning

outcomes that address responsible and professional

behavior in virtual environments have been met.

However from the administrative point of view a

number of problems have been encountered and there

is a feeling that accommodating those large student

groups in Second Life is still very resource inten-

sive. A straightforward and manageable process to

ease controlled enrollment and to provide students

with land to build on still needs to be identiﬁed.

An issue that remains essentially unresolved is the

lack of a backup process that would facilitate a fair

marking of the students work in case of a system fail-

ure.

Second Life enthusiasts often emphasize the suit-

ability of that virtual world for education, but iden-

tify the steep learning curve for the students concern-

ing basic steps on how to create, design and use their

avatar as the main obstacle. While there are some mi-

nor issues when it comes to creatively building struc-

tures such a view merely hides the real, resource in-

tensive, problems concerning enrollment and manag-

ing land accessibility. We have found that students are

generally willing and ready to adopt a virtual presence

within Second Life as part of their module diet. It is

Second Life itself that has still to mature technologi-

cally to allow smooth management of large numbers

of students.

However in view of ongoing research in this area,

to name only the SLOODLE (Kemp and Livingstone,

2006) project at the University of Edinburgh that aims

to integrate Second Life with the “traditional” con-

tent management system MOODLE, it can be envis-

aged that the technological difﬁculties will be over-

come eventually and that Second Life will play a more

prominent role in the educational sector in the future.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors want to thank the students of the Univer-

sity of Bedfordshire for their willingness to embark

with the authors on this journey. Without them this

work would not have been possible. We also want to

thank Yucca Gemini (Second Life avatar name) who

so beautifully landscaped the island of Bedfordia cre-

ating a stimulating atmosphere.

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