Teaching Risk with Virtual Worlds
Experience and Lessons Learnd in Second Life and Other Virtual Worlds
Marc Conrad
University of Bedfordshire, Luton, U.K.
Keywords: Risk Management, Second Life, Reaction Grid, Immersion, Situated Learning, Virtual Worlds, Project
Management.
Abstract: We discuss and demonstrate how Virtual Worlds available at the University of Bedfordshire have been used
to teach Project Management using a ‘situated learning’ approach. In particular we have a closer look on the
aspect of teaching risk management and identify how different aspects of risk are addressed in a variety of
implementations of Virtual Worlds, namely Second Life, a Virtual World provided by an external provider,
not Linden Lab, a Virtual World that is maintained ‘in-house’ and a Virtual World hosted by the students
themselves. We note that the student experience of risk is different in each of these incarnations of a Virtual
World which impacts their perception of risk and hence the effects this has concerning the teaching goals.
1 INTRODUCTION
Project management is an inherently inter-
disciplinary activity of relevance in many areas
ranging from software development to the
construction industry. The Project Management
Institute (PMI, 2008) defines project management as
“the application of knowledge, skill, tools, and
techniques to project activities to meet project
requirements”. In order to teach project management
an approach based on team-based, practical, hands-
on experience seems most appropriate. Within an
educational institution, such as a university, this can
be implemented following the ‘situated learning’
approach developed by Herrington and Oliver
(2000) which encompasses parameters such as
authentic context, multiple roles as well as
perspective and collaborative construction of
knowledge.
A prominent knowledge area within the project
management profession is risk management. The
importance of risk registers and contingency plans
need to be part of the practical activities to which
students are exposed. In the context of a university
activity the risks encountered by the students need to
be considered by the educators. Risk embraces an
inherent aspect of unpredictability and this should be
reflected in the design and implementation of the
student activities.
Virtual worlds provide a somewhat controlled
environment but still have aspects of uncertainties.
Therefore – as we will see in this paper – they
provide a useful way to implement risk management
within a project management course. This paper
discusses how virtual worlds have been used at the
University of Bedfordshire to enhance the student
experience, in particular in the context of project
management and draws conclusions on how
different types of virtual worlds impact upon the
students’ perception of risk.
Indeed, virtual worlds such as Second Life and
OpenSim based implementations have been used
within teaching of Project Management at the
University of Bedfordshire since 2008. The more
experimental experience during the early years with
Second Life as the platform and Linden Lab as the
provider is documented by Conrad, et al. (2009)
while a more systematic exposition of the Second
Life experience is then detailed within (Conrad,
2011a).
In 2011 a different provider, Reaction Grid, has
been used which is based on the OpenSim
architecture. While the underpinning technology is
similar there are notable differences between these
two environments, in particular – as shown by
Christopoulos and Conrad (2012) – concerning
immersion and context.
The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2
we provide the background on how project
management is defined as a combination of nine
331
Conrad M..
Teaching Risk with Virtual Worlds - Experience and Lessons Learnd in Second Life and Other Virtual Worlds.
DOI: 10.5220/0004382603310338
In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2013), pages 331-338
ISBN: 978-989-8565-53-2
Copyright
c
2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
different knowledge areas and the role of risk
management within this framework. Section 3
introduces the ‘situated learning’ approach and
highlights the rationale of using virtual worlds. We
then go on in Section 4 to discuss the various ways
in which virtual worlds have been used within the
University of Bedfordshire so as to facilitate an
assignment within project management. Section 5
then focuses on the risks that the students encounter
as part of their assignments and Section 6 follows
this up by providing a more detailed taxonomy of
virtual worlds and how the risk management
changes within these worlds.
2 KNOWLEDGE AREAS
The Project Management Institute (PMI) defines
Project Management as “the application of
knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project
activities to meet project requirements” (PMI, 2008).
In doing so it identifies nine knowledge areas,
namely time, cost, scope, quality, risk, human
resources, communication, procurement and
integration. Most prominently in this list features the
so called triple constraint of cost, time and scope.
These are clearly interdependent (an apocryphal joke
within Project Management is “fast, cheap and good
– choose two”) in that an early delivery (time) of the
product with more features (scope) will imply the
necessity of adding more money (cost). In the
specific context of a university assignment it is often
the case that not all of these knowledge areas can be
given equal emphasis: while a pressure to follow
time management processes such as using a GANNT
chart comes seamlessly from given (external to the
project, but implied by the university teaching
schedule) deadlines such as submissions dates or
weekly status reports the modelling of cost into such
an environment is not straightforward as the student
activities are usually not constrained by a (real)
budget and there are no salary costs. We see that
already balancing cost against time is difficult to
teach in practice.
Scope and quality control are possibly more
straightforward to embed into a university
assessment. From anecdotal experience we note that
students tend to associate the notion of ‘good quality
of work’ with the idea of ‘getting good grades’.
Human resources and communication can be
covered to a certain extent by allocating the students
into groups plus adding an element of self reflection
on team performance.
The knowledge area of ‘integration’ serves to tie
together the various activities to balance the other
areas (times, cost, etc.) and can be addressed by
exposing the students to an explicit Project
Management methodology (such as PRINCE2® at
the University of Bedfordshire).
Procurement can be addressed by requiring the
project team to interact with an ‘external’ provider.
Here we may distinguish between a true external
provider (as can be identified for instance as Linden
Labs for our Second Life based assignments) or a
“pretend” external provider which is impersonated
by the course tutors.
Difficult to incorporate into a university
assignment is the knowledge area of risk. Health and
safety considerations as well as common sense
dictate that students shouldn’t be knowingly exposed
to ‘serious’ risk (which is common to real projects)
such as damage to health, bankruptcy or other
material loss. There is also a perceived or real
difference between project risk (that should be
professionally managed by the team) and the risk of
failing the assessment (which students usually want
to avoid at all cost). By definition risk incorporates
uncertainty. In a university setting this ‘uncertainty’
is likely to conflict with a student’s desire of clear
criteria on how they are expected to perform in their
assignment. Therefore an assignment that
encompasses risk in a realistic way is not
straightforward and need to be crafted carefully so
as to provide a good and productive learning
experience by embracing certain risks while at the
same time addressing the requirements and
predictability of a university assignment.
3 SITUATED LEARNING
Conceptually our approach on teaching Project
Management follows Wilson (2002) in that “[t]he
entire structure of the assessment in this unit was
designed as a simulation of an activity that they [the
students] were likely to be involved in real life”. For
this the assignment has been set up to encompass the
characteristics of “situated learning” identified by
Herrington and Oliver (2000), namely: authentic
context, activities and assessment; expert
performances; multiple roles and perspectives;
collaborative construction of knowledge; reflection
and articulation; and finally coaching and
scaffolding.
Although very much desirable, assignments
following this ideal are often difficult to implement
in practice. For instance student experience outside
university premises is usually costly and adherence
CSEDU2013-5thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation
332
to health and safety standards requires careful
organizing. Activities within the university are
constrained by available space and facilities.
Virtual worlds offer here a feasible escape route
in so far as it widens the students’ experience
domain while still being contained in a controlled
environment. It allows the pursuit of a real, i.e.
authentic, project from within the lab environment
of an educational institution. It may be indeed a
matter of philosophical dispute in what way a
project within a virtual world is a ‘simulation’ or a
‘real project’. While the world in which the students
act and interact only exists in a computer (and,
indeed within the students brains!), therefore being
‘virtual’, the task requires the students to build real
artefacts in albeit a virtual world. The notion of
simulated space and real space blur. In fact, it has
been argued that there is no real difference between
a ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ experience (Conrad et al.,
2010). This blurring of ‘real’ and ‘virtual’
experience however makes virtual worlds an ideal
space to teach ‘real’ issues in a controlled
environment.
There is, however, a caveat: virtualization alone
doesn’t address all characteristics situated learning
requires. Multiple roles, collaboration or scaffolding
will need to be added as elements to make the
assignment successful and relevant. These features
have to be embedded as well. In the scope of this
paper we focus on the ‘authentic context’ aspect of
situated learning.
4 VIRTUAL WORLDS IN
BEDFORDSHIRE
At the University of Bedfordshire virtual worlds
have been used in various forms. The journey started
with the University acquiring two islands within
Second Life in 2007. In Figure 1 the island
“University of Bedfordshire” is visible in the
foreground with typical university style buildings
while the island of “Bedfordia” in the background
shows a more ‘open’ and creative landscape.
Indeed, “Bedfordia” was maintained by Teaching &
Learning to be used by educators while the island of
“University of Bedfordshire” was used by Marketing
to promote the virtual activities to the (virtual as
well as real, e.g. during open days) public. The
availability of these spaces encouraged the author of
this paper to utilize the island for his teaching
activities. Figure 2 shows the author in discussion
with the Head of Learning Technology in 2009 in
front of student work. As it happened and implied by
the large student numbers of up to 800 per cohort to
accommodate eventually both islands were used for
teaching activities.
Figure 1: The island "Bedfordia" and "University of
Bedfordshire" within Second Life, March 2010.
Figure 2: Two University of Bedfordshire educators in
front of student work.
Also visible in Figure 1 and 2 are the student
activities that took place on these two islands. In the
foreground of Figure 1, in the upper level are the
undergraduate student activities of AY 2009/10. On
the lower level underneath, areas have been prepared
where the postgraduate students start building soon.
Other buildings on the island, including a ‘library’
building prominently in the middle of “University of
Bedfordshire” are unrelated to the assignments but
provide (virtual) institutional context. In the upper
right corner of Figure 1 the remains of the activities
in the AY 2008/09 can still be identified. Figure 2
shows a close up of a typical student showcase
developed at that time.
One of the activities given to the students – and
indeed the least related to the scope of this paper but
mentioned here to set the project management
activities into context – was the delivery of a five
week course about Event Oriented Programming
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333
(Ferg, 2006) There, the Linden Scripting Language
(LSL) was introduced as an example of handling
events in an embedded system style environment.
Lectures consisted of the theoretical concepts plus
material adapted from the Second Life LSL wiki.
Students wrote simple scripts that interacted with the
virtual scenery. A typical example would be an
object that changes its appearance when touched or
moved. When the relationship between the
University of Bedfordshire and Linden Lab as the
Second Life provider discontinued the assignment
was first moved to an OSGrid island provided by
Dreamland Metaverse (Figure 3) in the Academic
Year 2010/11. The following year this activity was
moved to Reaction Grid.
Figure 3: LSL activities on an OSGrid island provided by
Dreamland Metaverese.
Project Management is taught both at
Postgraduate level and Undergraduate level. The
postgraduate course runs every spring for 12 weeks
while the undergraduate course is year-long unit
across 26 weeks from October to May. Students are
required to build a showcase using PRINCE2® as
the methodology.
Both courses used the space available within
Second Life on the university owned islands until
2010. Then the assignment moved over to Reaction
Grid as a provider. The differences and challenges
implied by this move (which also included a gap
year in the use of Virtual Worlds on the
undergraduate course in the Academic Year 2010/11
when no virtual world was readily available: in this
teaching year the ‘showcase’ requirement was
replaced by a rather unspecific requirement to use
web 2.0 technology) are documented by Conrad
(2011b): for instance the absence of an in-world
economy led to a redesign of the ‘cost management’
and ‘procurement’ aspects of the assignment (and
had implications on risk too, see Section 6). Indeed
students were encouraged to look at example
showcases within Second Life for inspiration while
building on the Reaction Grid island; hence utilising
in a productive way the similarity between these two
worlds.
Figure 4: The island at Reaction Grid, March 2012.
The overall structure of the assignments where
similar throughout: students are required to build an
in-world presentation (a ‘showcase’) on a topic
related to the course of the students.
The more experimental experience from the first
year has been published in (Conrad et al., 2009)
where the focus was on the suitability of Second
Life to be used for an assignment of that kind (which
by now can be seen as established, also in view of
many other teaching and learning activities within
virtual worlds). The main findings identify
institutional support as being essential and students
mostly do appreciate the use of Second Life in
teaching or at least do not object to this. In particular
the perceived ‘steep learning curve’ that students
have to master in order to get an avatar and to work
within Second Life did not seem to constitute an
issue for the success of this type of assignment.
The units Social and Professional Project
Management (on the undergraduate level) and
Professional Project Management (on the
postgraduate level) are taught across a number of
awards within the field of computing at the
University of Bedfordshire. These include awards in
Computer Science; Network and Security; Games
and Animation; Engineering as well as Business
Information Systems. Common to all of these
courses is that the students can be expected to be
computer literate when they start this course.
The design of the assignment is typically as
follows: students are assigned to project teams (the
size varies from 3 to 10 or more) and are given a
variety of artefacts to be produced, including the
showcase within the virtual world. Other artefacts
used in the previous years include a PowerPoint
presentation, booklets, podcasts or videos. In
addition, guidance is given on the use of PRINCE2®
as a project management methodology and relevant
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templates for essential PRINCE2® documentations
such as project brief, highlight reports and risk logs
are provided. At certain dates the submission of this
type of project documentation is required (such as
the project brief in the beginning and highlight
reports during the course of the assessment). These
documents allow the tutors to provide formative
feedback. The students are graded according to their
individual contribution to the project team.
Figure 5: Screenshot presented to the AY 11/12
postgraduate students to illustrate the location where to
build.
To illustrate this type of assignment we provide
in the following an excerpt of the assignment brief
that has been given to the postgraduate students in
the Academic Year 2011/2012:
“[…] You are working as a group of 10
individuals who need to come together and work as
a team. You will be using the PRINCE2 project
management methodology to run a real-life project.
As part of an educational advisory team you have
been asked to create an educational showcase about
an emerging technology. The area that you look at
must be directly related to the pathway that you are
studying, but may cover any aspect of technology
within this area. As part of this project you will have
to deliver a number of products.
As a team you must produce the following:
[…]
5) An educational showcase about the
technology in a virtual world. Land will be provided
at the ‘New Bedfordia’ island at ReactionGrid.
Please note that familiarization with the underlying
technology is part of the project work and therefore
must be managed as part of the project work; […]
As an individual you must produce the following
[…]”
Detailed instructions and other resources where
then given; for instance the screenshot in Figure 5
(which was made available to the students) helped
them to identify the space where they should build
their showcase within Reaction Grid.
The following explicit constraint was given as
well: “The educational showcase must not exceed an
area of 8x8 meters and the maximum height is 5
meters […]. The showcase must be visual
appealing.” Figure 6 is a screenshot of the same
areas as seen in Figure 5 nearly before the
completion of the showcases against the end of the
assignment.
Further details on the various educational
activities, the nature of the student projects including
detailed screenshots are available on the author’s
web site: http://sl.sanfoh.com.
Figure 6: The same area as in Fig. 5 towards the end of the
assignment.
5 RISK MANAGEMENT IN
VIRTUAL WORLDS
The Project Management Institute (PMI, 2008)
defines risk in the context of project management as
an uncertainty that can have a negative or positive
effect on meeting the project objectives. In particular
those risks with negative effects need to be
addressed explicitly using appropriate mechanisms.
For instance a “risk register” or “risk log” is
standard within project management methodologies
and used within virtually all professionally managed
projects. In order to address risk management as a
learning outcome within a university assignment it is
necessary to expose the student groups, i.e. the
“project teams” to certain risks that need to be
managed by the team. From our experience with
virtual worlds at the University of Bedfordshire, in
the context of the Virtual World environment
(Second Life or Reaction Grid), contingency plans
should address at least the following situations:
Availability of the Virtual World on the client
side: there are several risks in this context. The
Virtual World may not be available for an
TeachingRiskwithVirtualWorlds-ExperienceandLessonsLearndinSecondLifeandOtherVirtualWorlds
335
individual team member, e.g. when working
from home with a slow Internet connection or
with unsuitable hardware. Contingency plans
may then include the redistribution of work to
other team members, or the use of a public
Internet cafe for certain specific tasks. Clearly
the availability of suitable client software within
university premises should be established by the
educators; nevertheless a temporary problem
with these needs to be flagged up as risks for the
project as well.
Availability of the service provider: The worst
case scenario is obviously an apocalyptic ‘end of
the world’ which indeed can happen in our
simulated environment: the provider
discontinues their service. As a matter of fact
Reaction Grid did so for this type of (i.e.
OpenSim based) virtual world in 2012 moving
their business model onwards to other aspects of
virtual world provision. It should be noted
however – they did so with plenty of notice and
it did not affect the course of our assessments.
While these risks need to be flagged up and
monitored by the project team the resolution of
these cannot be expected by the students (i.e. the
project team) but need to be escalated to the
project board (i.e. the course tutor) for further
action.
Availability of the building area: There are two
risks that need to be managed by the project
team: the unavailability because the island is
overcrowded, or a temporary unavailability due
to maintenance by the owner of the island.
Second Life had regular periods when regions
were taken down for updates etc. In both cases a
contingency plan will require the re-scheduling
of in-world activities.
Interference with other groups: Similar to the
risk of non-availability of the building area due
to overcrowding is the general risk of
interference with other groups. Primitives and
objects may be misplaced and impact other
groups’ structures. In such events the situation
needs to be managed (typically by contacting the
owner of the misplaced object) and the action
needs to be properly recorded. Communication
here can happen both in-world or in the ‘real’
world.
Other risks we observed include the accidental
delete of (virtual) objects, the unavailability of the
avatar due to lost passwords or problems caused by
software bugs in Second Life itself (such as data
base problems leading to lost items).
The course team needs to ensure proper
assessment and grading if such risks materialize.
For instance proper project management needs to be
acknowledged (with the consequence of good
grades) even if some desirable features of the
showcase are missing as part of a contingency plan
that has been put in place to address problems of
unavailability of Second Life. This would be
evidenced by documentation of a controlled scope
change of the project. In contrast, an unfinished
structure that cannot be explained by the project
team is not acceptable.
It is however not the role of the course tutors to
minimize risks other than those that impact the
assessment as a whole. Any action by the course
team (for instance removing misplaced objects or to
eject / restrict avatars from the island to ease
overcrowding) should only be addressed as a
response to a formal request of the project manager
to the project board.
6 LEVELS OF IMMERSION AND
RISK MANAGEMENT
Virtual Worlds provide the opportunity of
immersion (Cunningham, 2007) to become part of
the virtual world, to lead a ‘second life’ in its most
literal meaning. Indeed this distinguishes virtual
worlds from other social and collaborative places
such as chat rooms or discussion forums. Questions
of identity may raise the debate about the way such a
virtual world can or should be separated from the
real life experience (Peachy and Childs, 2011). In a
university assignment it is a matter of debate what
role immersion has to play: eventually student work
is assessed in real life with real grades.
Recent studies conducted in the general context
of the assignment indicate that immersion plays a
role and that there are notable differences between
Second Life and Reaction Grid. For instance
Kanamgotov et al. (2012) discuss a quantitative
evaluation of immersion based on questionnaires
distributed to students. The important role of
immersion is as well further confirmed in
(Christopoulos and Conrad, 2012) where this aspect
is investigated in the context of projects outside the
University of Bedfordshire.
In the following we discuss how the notion and
implementation of risk management is different
depending on the direct virtual environment in
which the assignment is conducted. Following
Conrad (2011b) we distinguish between: the main
stream provider (i.e. Second Life), a dedicated
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336
provider, an OSgrid based provider, an institutional
hosted virtual world and a virtual world hosted by
the student him or herself. The first two scenarios
are deduced from our direct experience at the
University of Bedfordshire when running the
assignments while the alternatives where actively
considered in preparation for them.
Main stream provider (Second Life): In our
experience and following the research cited above
Second Life offers the highest degree of immersion
compared to the other solutions. The whole concept
and marketing strategy appears to be based around
the idea of escaping from the ‘real world’ and the
various amenities including shops and party spaces
underline this. Project risks may appear from
interference of random visitors to the project islands
or instabilities of the virtual world itself. Risk
management strategies will include interaction with
other avatars, possibly even avatars unrelated to the
university who visit the university island.
Dedicated provider (e.g. Reaction Grid):
While similar to Second Life on the technological
level a dedicated provider does not provide the same
level of immersion (Kanamgotov et al., 2012) or
context (Christopoulos and Conrad, 2013). Risk
management might here include interaction with the
technical support team of Reaction Grid via their
ticketing system. In-world support is unlikely to be
encountered due to the sparse population in this
world and a low presence of technical support in the
form of avatars.
OSgrid provider (e.g. Dreamland Metaverse):
The configuration of the OSgrid environment allows
the possibility to teleport to various places including
those not hosted by the provider of the university
island. Promoted as an open source alternative to
Second Life many amenities are mirrored within the
OSgrid environment. Risk management might here
include getting help in user forums and help pages,
i.e. by utilizing sources from the Internet but outside
the virtual world or to identify available resources
within the Hypergrid.
Institutional Virtual World host: The degree of
perceived immersion will depend on how the virtual
world is set up. It can easily be envisaged (and might
even become the norm in the distant future) that
university owned ‘virtual space’ becomes normal
within a university similar to ‘real’ spaces. Facilities
such as library, lecture theatres, student union as
well as prayer rooms could have a virtual equivalent
and being populated with student avatars. Running
the assignment in this context would possibly be
similar to running the assignment in the context of
dedicated spaces within the university. Risk
management in this setting would be confined to
interaction within university context. While this
might be preferable in order to control the
assignment it would also take away the interesting
aspect of interaction with ‘external’ stakeholders.
Students host their own Virtual World: Many
virtual worlds (one for each student) would co-exist
independently from each other. Risk would be very
much managed as with other student owned
resources. The data on which the world works needs
backup and software problems would be escalated to
relevant experts or solved DIY style. From all
options this seems to be the least desirable as the
aforementioned ‘situated learning’ aspect would be
effectively non-existent.
In summary there seems to be a shift from a ‘real
risk’ situation as experienced within Second Life to
a ‘student risk’ situation when moving from Second
Life to other provides. The experience of immersion
or lack thereof appears to impact the perspective
from which risk is perceived. Further research to
underpin this observation with solid data would be
needed.
7 CONCLUSIONS
Virtual Worlds offer new possibilities in the
educational sector and they can certainly help to
teach students the essential concepts of Project
Management. Indeed areas that are difficult to
address in ‘conventional’ assignments, such as risk
are addressed in a more natural way within such a
multi user virtual environment.
As demonstrated, the experience at the
University of Bedfordshire in the recent years shows
that Project Management in general and risk in
particular can be experienced within the safety of a
virtual world. Various aspects of risk management
are addressed in this type of assignment. We then
argued that the nature of the virtual world, for
instance if it is hosted within the institution, by a
dedicated provider, or by the students play a
significant role and imply differences on how risk is
perceived by the students. Indeed an assignment that
has started within Second Life cannot be moved so
easily to a different provider – even if the
technology that supports it is the same – as the
difference in environment and hence immersion will
change the nature of the students’ perception and
hence the ‘situation’ in which the students find
themselves.
While the work presented here focuses on the
development at the University of Bedfordshire the
TeachingRiskwithVirtualWorlds-ExperienceandLessonsLearndinSecondLifeandOtherVirtualWorlds
337
observations are relevant in a wider context. Situated
learning is not only useful to Project Management
but also to other disciplines with vocational learning
goals. Even more, in view of the various Virtual
World implementations interviews with educators
from other institutions (Christopoulos and Conrad,
2013) do not identify a clear preference but seem
rather ambiguous. Further research (including
experimentation and a systematic student evaluation)
is needed to identify how future Virtual Worlds
should look like in order to provide an optimal
environment for students to achieve a relevant
learning experience.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author wishes to thank the University of
Bedfordshire. Without their commitment to
encourage Second Life as a teaching platform this
research would not have been possible.
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LINKS TO SOFTWARE
Second Life: http://secondlife.com
Reaction Grid : http://reactiongrid.net
OSgrid: http://www.osgrid.org
Dreamland Metaverse: http://www.dreamlandmetaverse.
com
OpenSim: http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page
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