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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
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