NMC Campus Observer

Preparing to Teach an Undergraduate Course in SL, Part III

Professor Beliveau (aka Ed Lamoureux) : Dec 5, 2006 06:36pm

Preparing to Teach an Undergraduate Course in SL, Part III

A quick reminder since it has been awhile since I’ve posted. I am preparing to teach a Bradley University undergraduate course, Multimedia 490: Field Research in Second Life, during the January three-week interim period.

This post will update two previous articles linked here.

I’ll summarize some of the events surrounding protection of human subjects issues, our planning for doomsday, the public relations and attention the course has received, my becoming a landowner, student recruiting and enrollment, and the first class meeting.

Human Subject Protection (HSP) Planning

In addition to the actual concerns for the protection of human subjects, preparations to do research within Second Life need to meet two additional constraints. First, Linden Lab has Research policies, an application process, and and approval process. Here is a link for those procedures.

Recently, Linden Lab has improved their procedures in this regard. At the time that I went through the procedure, their response rate was very slow.

Second, the Bradley University Human Subjects Protection Committee has a procedure in place for approving research projects. Normally, field research of the nature planned would be exempt from full committee approval. If the research were done in the real world one would only file an application for the exemption. However, after showing Second Life to the committee, and discussing the nature of the class, they decided that since subjects’ names are always displayed, each individual student would have to go through the full application and approval process for their research project. For a time, I thought that we would have to make special arrangements for each student to file that application. Given this is an introduction to field research, that students are new researchers, and that the class takes place over the course of only three weeks, I was very concerned about the constraints the process might place.
However, while preparing the class materials I became convinced that the class activities we planned indeed full within the exemption category. I made an appeal to the committee chair, who agreed with my assessment. As a result, I have filed a single application to the committee listing me as the primary investigator and my students as co-investigators. We have submitted a series of human subjects protection techniques that we’ll follow. Specifically,

1) We will follow Linden Lab procedures for planning and notification.
2) Linden will announce the research and identify the research class and members to the community.
3) I will create a “Researcher” group identification for all student avatars.
a. However, the “casing” portion of “entering the field” will be done without this designation, before any data collection takes place.
b. Once data collection and class begin, the designation will be displayed prominently on all student researchers/avatars at all times.
4) Bradley Human Subject Protection Committee chair reviewed and approved the application for exemption from full review for field research.
5) I’ve created a HSP handout to be carried by every student as a notecard offered to any avatar who inquires as to the research work or the researcher’s presence.
6) We will maintain subject confidentiality in data management (coded names, etc).
7) I’ve forbidden students from copying and saving transcripts of talk from subjects from whom they have not gotten permission (and who haven’t been given an HSP handout)
I’ve forbidden students from using camera controls to see through objects and into spaces where they are not co-present with the subjects.
9) We will publish the URL for the student course blogs on the Linden Lab blog site.
10) I will review the student blogs regularly to catch any “beginners’” mistakes that might compromise subject protections.
11) We will block out avatar names and faces in cases of publishing photos of subjects without their permission.
12) Copies of final papers will posted to the student blog for the benefit of the subject communities and others.

“Doomsday” issues

Additional attention was paid to issues surrounding payment for the class and credit for the class as they are related to Second Life stability issues. Due largely to its increased popularity Second Life has suffered a number of denial of service attacks. It is within the imagination to expect that someday Second Life might be sold and perhaps closed for a time as it changes hands. Extended closures would compromise a class like this one that takes place over the course of only three weeks. Bradley had no procedures for refunding tuition or giving partial credit for classes under such conditions. As a result, we have had to write special procedures which protect students and Bradley alike in the case of Second Life closure.

We split the class into three equal segments, labeled each separately, and signed the students up into those one week segments. Money will be collected at the beginning but only banked as each week goes by. If Second Life were to become unusable we could give students a grade for the amount of class we have finished and only take as much money as has been spent; so no refunds would be required and students will receive credit for what they’ve done. Students may not invoke this procedure. Only the loss of Second Life brings the procedure into play.

Positive PR and Attention

The class has gotten a lot of positive attention and press (this is usually though to be “good” for innovative units). At this point Second Life is a popular object of press attention. Involvement in Second Life brings that positive attention to one’s unit. Here is a link to a page which displays some of the attention that has been gained from this effort, even before the class has been taught (as well as containing a link to the class syllabus)

Additionally, we will be holding a special session of the class to which the Provost, the Dean, reporters in the Bradley public relations office, and other dignitaries have been invited. Again, there is a positive outcome for the unit through this exposure. I also was able to make the trip to the NMC Regional Meeting in San Antonio and to make a presentation about the course planning efforts there.
Land Ownership

As a side note, I would draw attention to the fact that a supporter and friend purchased a premium membership for me as part of my development efforts. While I did not mind being homeless and poor (though I did whine about it a lot), in Second Life it is more fun to own land, to build, and to have some Linden dollars than not. I will continue my enrollment after the gift period expires and I recommend it to others. I now have a small hut in which I will offer virtual office hours and which I use as my entry and exit point from Second Life.

Student recruitment and interest

I was surprised by the general lack of interest in the class among the students here at Bradley. I thought that our students would be very interested; however only five applied for the class. This number is enough to enable us to teach the class, but with no extra students to spare. We had lots of publicity and the opportunity seems to match the interests of Multimedia students. Nevertheless, our numbers are small.

First Class Meeting

We have held a successful first meeting. Although the entire class, and the student research, will take place within Second Life, I had scheduled a face-to-face meeting to take place before the students left over the semester break.

We had our first class meeting inworld Saturday, December 2. Four of the five enrolled students “attended.” The session was supposed to be face-to-face, first, in our labs (to cover content) and then inworld to test technologies.

But I got snowed in at home . . . West Peoria got a foot of snow overnight Thurs/Fri and had not yet gotten snow plows by class time on Saturday, so I could not leave the house. One of the students had a car stuck in a garage in an unplowed alley. So we met inworld instead of fully in the lab. Three of the 4 got into the lab in our building; one was in his apartment, and I was at home.

It took us about 15-20 minutes to get started as one lab machine had not gotten the Wednesday download/update and was not set up with Team Speex. The other two lab students used their own laptops. Once we got the technology rolling, we covered:

-Books & reading ahead
-Course goals and general activities
-Teamspeex
-iChat audio (I though we would use a “group” iChat audio in the case of temporary Second Life outages)
-course constraints (BU and SL human subjects protection)
-blogs (we want the students to have them for this class)
-locations in SL (searching for places to do research)
-between now and then/before class starts: find interesting communities of practice as potential topics of study.
-thursday the 4th of January: we’ll have guests in lab, in class (over my shoulder displayed on the screen)
-land/$? (and time management): one of our colleague/friends has offered to loan the student land during the course. I gave the students Linden dollars to meet their needs. We discussed not spending too much time inworld.
-We discussed the doomsday accommodations.

The session went great. We finished a little under 2 hours. Only one issue came up and we resolved it. I was going to use multiple person audio iChat to cover SL if it’s down during class. But we have two PC users who can do single, but not multiple iChat audio sessions.

So we are going to use TeamSpeex for audio and iChat (text) for text chat during any sessions at which SL isn’t available.

This ends, then, my third report in preparation for class. I continue to be grateful for the support offered by the NMC, And I look forward to filing my final report after the conclusion of the class at the end of January.

Story filed under: Teaching and Learning

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