Problem-based Virtual World Design for Virtual Reality Education
An Experiment with the Opensimulator Platform for Second Life-based Virtual Worlds
George Anastassakis and Themis Panayiotopoulos
Department of Informatics, University of Piraeus, Piraeus, Greece
Keywords: Virtual Reality, Problem-based Learning, Virtual World, Second Life, Opensimulator.
Abstract: In this paper we present our current efforts with a novel, problem-based learning paradigm for academic-
level education on topics related to Virtual Reality. The paradigm embraces problem-based learning
principles and methods, adopts methodologies and technologies pertaining to the Second Life online virtual
environment and relies on the use of exclusively free software, namely, the OpenSimulator platform for
Second Life-based virtual environments. We have applied the paradigm for the purposes of a BSc-level
course module on Virtual Reality and have evaluated its educational impact and appeal to students through a
questionnaire-based survey.
1 INTRODUCTION
Virtual Reality is the scientific field whose object is
the design and operation of virtual worlds. Virtual
Reality has numerous applications, in fields such as
simulation, entertainment, art, education and others.
Thanks to its capacity to support complex,
dynamic and, recently, shared simulations with
online access capabilities, Virtual Reality is an ideal
option for educational applications. However, even
though Virtual Reality has been put to actual use as an
educational aid extensively until today, its potential as
a means to teach, and practice with, topics related to
Virtual Reality itself, including virtual world design,
real-world application, technical administration,
product promotion, etc., does not seem to have been
as thoroughly investigated.
In this paper we present our current efforts with a
novel, problem-based educational paradigm (Barrett
and Moore, 2010) aiming to advance academic-level
teaching of Virtual Reality-related topics. The
proposed paradigm relies on the use of shared virtual
worlds accessible online and realized using
exclusively free software – namely, the
OpenSimulator platform for Second Life-based
virtual environments (OpenSimulator, 2012) – and
has a strong focus on self-directed learning,
collaboration and well-meant competition. We have
applied the proposed paradigm in the context of a
BSc-level course module on Virtual Reality during
the academic year of 2011-2012 in the Department
of Informatics, University of Piraeus, Greece.
2 RELATED WORK
Relatively recent technological advances in Virtual
Reality have enabled non-expert user access to
large-scale, multi-user virtual virtual worlds, such as
Second Life. Due to that and thanks to a range of
representation and interaction abilities, Virtual
Reality has been, and is still being, extensively used
as an educational aid, in areas such as training
(Johnson et al., 1998), tutoring (Aylett et al., 2005),
childcare (Albin-Clark et al., 2012), and others. In
several cases there is specific focus on problem-
based learning (for example, machinima production
in Second Life (Brown et al., 2008), human-
computer interaction education (Koutsabasis and
Vosinakis, 2012), and others).
However, the potential of Virtual Reality
applications as learning grounds for topics related to
Virtual Reality itself as a scientific field, such as
application life-cycle management, collaborative
virtual world design, administration and operation,
product promotion, etc., does not seem to have been
thoroughly investigated. Attempts involving game
engines such as the Unreal Engine and the Unity
Engine have been employed on occasion; however,
these are burdened by the fact that they demand a
high level of technical expertise and platform-
513
Anastassakis G. and Panayiotopoulos T..
Problem-based Virtual World Design for Virtual Reality Education - An Experiment with the Opensimulator Platform for Second Life-based Virtual
Worlds.
DOI: 10.5220/0004390205130516
In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2013), pages 513-516
ISBN: 978-989-8565-53-2
Copyright
c
2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
specific knowledge from students, which has a
negative impact on the educational process as it
diverges the students' attention to technicalities.
3 METHODOLOGY
Our motivation behind the educational paradigm
presented in this paper was to provide students with
all skills necessary to be able to address real-world
situations in which the desired outcome is a virtual
world, or a part of a virtual world, of specific and
actual practical and, perhaps, commercial, value.
These skills include the ability to:
1. plan the entire endeavour, from the initial
requirement analysis to design, implementation
and final presentation,
2. allocate and make optimal use of all required
resources, including software, virtual world
space, virtual world design assets, programming
elements, time and human collaborators,
3. coordinate a team of collaborators working
remotely and on diverse locations not attached to
any sense of office space,
4. provide early evidence to the client party
(contractor, instructor, etc.) in support of the
endeavour's timely and effective progression as
well as its success potential, and
5. present the final product to the client party,
making clear that all original goals were attained
and ensuring the party's full ability to benefit
from the product as originally intended.
To that end, we adopted a problem-based
learning approach for term assignments given to
students of a BSc-level course module on Virtual
Reality during the academic year of 2011-2012,
which builds upon the following key factors:
1. Students were to work in teams of no more
than 3 members.
2. Each team was to select a theme, without any
restriction whatsoever imposed by the
instructors, and commit to its realization.
3. Each team was allocated a specific area inside
a persistent, shared virtual world accessible
over the Internet, in which all teams could
watch the efforts of their colleagues,
communicate with everyone in the virtual
world, exchange ideas and even adopt observed
practices if they found them to be suitable for
their own purposes.
4. Each team was to make key design decisions
with a considerable potential impact on their
success, in compliance with specific (but
minimal) restrictions given during class. These
decisions include design contracts, aesthetic
options, functionality and means of interaction
with the virtual world, additional multimedia
content and building methodologies.
5. All teams were to adhere to common-sense
fair-use practices: They were not to interfere
with the work of their colleagues in any way
and to not abuse the virtual world infrastructure
according to specific guidelines presented to
them during class.
6. Each team was to designate and commit to
their own collaboration, communication and
scheduling contracts.
Our intention with the above approach was to stir
a strong feeling of responsibility and personal
involvement with the success of a specific goal in
each individual student, as well as to stress the
importance of collaborative practices, both within
the team as well as among teams.
Our virtual world infrastructure was based on
OpenSimulator platform, an open-source, multi-
platform, multi-user 3D application server based on
the Second Life online virtual environment and
available as free software. Students were given the
opportunity to select their building areas on their
own, on a first-come-first-served basis. We also
reserved a central area for facilities to be used for
teaching, demonstration, and information
channelling purposes. All students were given
precise details about how their assignments would
be evaluated according to concepts and criteria
presented and discussed during class. These include
originality of the theme chosen, consistency with the
chosen theme, design precision, compactness of the
final product, variety of available means to interact
with the virtual world, practical application potential
and the degree to which the final product would
succeed in generating an overall, subjective feeling
of presence, interest, purpose and continuity to users
experiencing it on their own.
4 RESULTS AND EVALUATION
During the term, we were pleased to see that most
students began working quite early and on the basis
of solid team-level coordination. Their involvement
was constant throughout the time the virtual world
was available, while their selection of subjects as
well as their design and implementation approaches
were diverse and imaginative.
Overall, the students' enthusiasm and the
diversity and quality of their work provided us with
strong evidence for the success of the approach and
CSEDU2013-5thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation
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its suitability as a means for academic-level
education on Virtual Reality-related issues.
However, in order to attain a more precise and
thorough understanding of whether students felt the
approach was beneficial (or not) on a number of
different levels as well as how various factors had a
positive or negative impact on their work and ability
to fully benefit from the approach, we carried-out a
questionnaire-based survey on a total of 58 students.
Each questionnaire contained 35 questions which
were selected with an aim to identify the students'
overall impression and feelings about the approach
in general, as well as the perceived educational
impact, the inherent elements of cooperation and
competition, the concurrent online accessibility and
remote-work model, the compatibility of the
approach with an academic curriculum and its
suitability and effectiveness as an educational
methodology, the availability of documentation and
educational resources, and the technical issues they
faced during their efforts. More specifically:
100% of the students answered that they found
the experience an overall pleasant one with
84% strongly arguing that that was the case.
This is, of course, a very encouraging outcome,
albeit unreliable on its own: further
investigation must provide a clear picture on
exactly why students saw the experience as a
pleasant one.
62% of the students believe the approach had a
strongly positive educational impact, 33%
believe the impact was just positive, and only
5% believe that the impact was negative with
none having a strong negative opinion. As the
ultimate goal of the approach is to enable an
effective educational paradigm, this 5%,
however small, must be further investigated.
91% of the students saw the experience as a
highly creative one and 5% as just creative.
This is a very encouraging result as it clearly
indicates that all students have experienced the
increased creativity potential the approach –
and Virtual Reality, as a consequence –
represents.
91% of the students, of which 41% have a
strong favourable opinion, would like to have
the option to carry out assignments for other
course modules (not necessarily related to
Virtual Reality) based on similar approaches.
Regarding two crucial aspects of the whole
endeavour, namely, the elements of cooperation and
inevitable (and hoped-for) well-meant competition
due to students being constantly able to monitor the
work of others as it took place:
47% of the students are strongly in favour of
the collaborative scheme, while 31% are just in
favour. However, 22% would have rather
worked alone. It must be noted that this is not
about teamwork: the formation of teams was
optional as students were by all means allowed
to work individually; rather, it reflects that a
non-negligible 20% of the students felt
uncomfortable with having to share the same
work space with, and being under constant
surveillance by, their colleagues.
Along the above lines, 57% had absolutely no
problems due to the fact that other users could
navigate freely to and in their allocated areas.
28% were simply OK with it while an again
non-negligible 15% were not, with a 5%
having a strong negative opinion.
66% of the students declared that their
observation of their colleagues' work made
them revisit their original planning and and
adjust their design goals and methods to at least
some degree, while an additional 17% state that
they completely changed direction for similar
reasons. 18% were affected only a very little or
not at all. This is a most remarkable result as it
indicates that the inherent capacity of the
approach to enable competition has affected a
good 83% of all students who participated in
the survey in spite of the fact that
reconsideration of one's design goals and
practices is always a decisive, risky, never-
effortless option.
The survey also made it possible to draw useful
conclusions on the aspects of concurrent online
accessibility and the remote-work model:
The online, concurrent access model is
favoured by a marginal majority of 58%. The
other 42% would have rather worked on a
standalone server reserved for them or their
team. We mean to investigate the nature of this
result thoroughly. We believe that it has much
to do with a variety of technical obstacles that
arose during the term, which had an
undoubtedly negative impact on the students'
ability to access the virtual world and has,
perhaps, lowered their confidence in the
general practice of online access to a shared
virtual world (which they are completely
unable to manage in contrast with a fully-
manageable local server).
However, provided that the virtual world was
available, the concurrent online access model
had minimal negative impact (if any) to most
students: A total of 83% answered that the
Problem-basedVirtualWorldDesignforVirtualRealityEducation-AnExperimentwiththeOpensimulatorPlatformfor
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515
presence of multiple users in the virtual world
did not hinder their ability to work without
problems related to service availability,
response latency, etc.
It must also be noted that, although students were
largely responsible for resolving land- and building-
related “disputes”, unauthorised content replication
issues, etc., there were certain occasions on which
we had to intervene, as we believe any instructor
coordinating a similar effort will have to do. For
instance, on a few occasions, we had to deactivate
pieces of scripting code that disregarded good
programming practices (regardless of the relevant
discussions during class) and, as a result, drained the
virtual world server's resources. However, those
occasions were rare and created no significant
problems of any kind.
5 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE
WORK
In this paper, we present our current efforts towards
a novel, problem-based learning paradigm for
academic-level education on topics related to Virtual
Reality as well as our results from the application of
the paradigm on a Virtual Reality-related BSc course
module during the academic year of 2011-2012. Our
approach aimed at the collaborative design of a
shared, remotely- and concurrently-accessible virtual
world and relies exclusively on free software tools
based on the Second Life virtual environment,
namely, the Open Simulator platform and Second
Life-compatible viewers.
Based on our own subjective impressions of how
students welcomed the novel approach as well as
their collective opinions about it as expressed
through a questionnaire-based survey, and in spite of
numerous technical issues both we and the students
faced during the term, we feel that the endeavour
was overall successful and beneficial on different
levels for most, if not all, of the students who
participated. For this reason, we will maintain our
commitment to the underlying paradigm while
working to further augment its educational impact
and systematize its applicability.
More specifically, we plan to adopt a similar
approach for two course modules (one BSc-level
and one MSc-level) during the academic year of
2012-2013. This will give us the opportunity to
obtain richer evaluation data, investigate a potential
correlation between different academic backgrounds
and the paradigm's suitability, as well as enhance the
assessment process by adopting more specific and
robust evaluation criteria. We also aim to enhance
the element of cooperation by assigning one region
to each module adjacent to the region which was
used in the case of the 2011-2012 BSc-level course
module presented in this paper, so that all students
are able to observe, and draw inspiration by, the
work of other students. In addition, we aim to further
expand the application of the paradigm by seeking
cross-departmental and cross-institutional co-
operations. In conclusion, we have already taken
measures to prevent technical problems aiming to
ensure that the proposed paradigm's potential
educational benefits will not be hindered by
inadequate infrastructure and lack of resources.
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