NMC Campus Observer

Preparing to Teach an Undergraduate Course in SL

Professor Beliveau (aka Ed Lamoureux) : Jul 19, 2006 09:34pm

I’ve been working toward teaching an undergraduate course on the NMC Campus of Second Life (SL) for about 3 weeks now and I’ve been asked to report on my experiences and progress. I’ll file this report in three parts: Part One will describe what I’m hoping to accomplish and a bit about why; Part Two will detail some of my experiences in the process of making arrangements for the course; Part Three will discuss my attempts to learn about SL as I prepare for the teaching experience. So first, a bit about what I’m intending to do.

The course in the Multimedia Program at Bradley University (BU) will be titled Field Research in Second Life (Multimedia 490, MM 490) and will be held during our three week January Interim, 2007 from 6-9 pm. I’m planning to hold class enrollment for this first effort at 8 maximum. At Bradley, in “extra” terms, we can teach a course with as few as one student (receiving half their tuition as our pay). At 5 students, we receive the regular “full” stipend (7% of our base). Subsequent terms/offerings will adjust the number of students based on the experience we have this coming January.

The general course objectives include, to:

1. teach real world field research (communication ethnography) techniques.
2. adapt real world field research techniques to a virtual environment.
3. examine the potential of immersive online communities as teaching and learning environments, both for BU/MM and for New Media Consortium and its partners/sponsors.
4. expose BU/MM students (as future MM producers) to an immersive, online, 3D environment that has purposes in addition to/other than gaming.

The course will be conducted as an online experience with students and faculty working from their homes. There will be a daily 1 hour class meeting in a conference location on the NMC/SL campus. Each class will consist of a short lecture delivered either live or via video, a question and answer session over concepts, and brief student reports of their field research the previous day. Students will complete oral quizzes over the lecture and reading material (one or two textbooks to be determined) and will document and turn in field reports and a major final paper reporting their ethnographic findings concerning communication practices in Second Life. One student will be recruited and employed (for class credit) to document the class project.

Why am I interested in doing this?

I’m a pretty strong game skeptic. However, most of our students are gaming enthusiasts, many of them entered our program so that they can learn the skills required for entry into the game production fields. I’m (mostly) the theory guy here, so I have to see how this stuff works. I don’t play games… so SL gives me a chance to see some of the stuff that “they” do, but not have to get into X boxes and the like.

Further, distance and online learning are interesting to me, and in my view, are of crucial importance to the future of education. Our program is pretty interested in innovation- our students need exposure to great new stuff (though we can’t keep up with everyone on everything). We’ve decided to take the “learning simulation” tack on games; the kids come in wanting games so we are teaching information that could be used that way, but we’re approaching it from a learning environment perspective.

Finally, and not the least important, this effort presents a potential revenue stream for me. We have trouble “making” off-term courses here (interims and summers) if/when students have to be in Peoria instead of home. Online courses can work, but we (in MM) don’t really have anything I’m willing to offer that way. This course experience is (at least potentially) perfect. I should be able to repeat it in different versions over future “off” terms. We’ll limit the numbers until I get real good at it, so it will repeat… gives me a pretty stable platform for extra income for a time. Additionally, our office of Continuing Education runs a small grant program for the development of innovative online learning/courses. I’m to receive a small stipend in support of the development of the first run of the course.

In about a week, then, I’ll produce Part Two of this report, focusing on my experiences making arrangements for the course. Until then, see you in SL! I can be reached via email at ell@bradley.edu or iChat (text, audio, or video) as dredleelam. My Skype account is also dredleelam.

Story filed under: Teaching and Learning

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