 Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 5.30 to 6 o'clock session of the 2021 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session, we are pleased to introduce the presentation Designing Educational Virtual Simulations. Our speakers are Dr. Rachel Umoran and Matt Cook. Rachel is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Washington, where she is the Director of Neonatal Education and Simulation-Based Training and Neonatal Telemedicine Lead. She is also an Adjunct Professor in the University of Washington's Department of Global Health. Matt is a Design Engineer for the University of Washington and a Unity Virtual Reality Developer. Matt's experience includes designing and developing VR for education and research applications. Please check the website found at conference.opensimulator.org for speaker bios, for details of the session, and the full schedule of events. The session is being live-streamed and recorded, so if you have questions or comments during the session, you may send tweets to at opensimcc with the hashtag pound oscc21. Welcome everyone, let's begin the session. Thank you so much for that lovely introduction and it's a pleasure to be here once again. I think this has been the best conference yet, and I've been attending this conference since 2013. So today we're pleased to be here to discuss designing educational virtual simulations for learners of diverse professions and cultures. And I've been working like many of us in the metaverse for about 10 years now, and my focus has really been on the use of virtual simulations for training health professional learners. So it's truly exciting to be here. I've learned so much from the wonderful presentations so far and I really welcome any questions or comments from the audience, particularly educators who've been working in this space. So we've used Second Life and OpenSim as well as Unity platforms and we continue to explore how to most effectively teach and evaluate learners in both high and low resource settings using virtual simulations and our work is really platform agnostic at this point. We're just looking for the best fit for learners. So I'd like to just give a quick shout out to Stephen. I saw him in the audience earlier from the Vibe group because they really got us started with that transition from Second Life to OpenSim and beyond. So much appreciated. So these experiences have really led me to reflect on the importance of design principles and concepts which we'll be sharing with you. Several years ago I started thinking about how learners in different platforms and with different professions responded to the virtual simulations that we were putting them through. Some of these thoughts were really brought on by a study that we undertook with learners in three different professional programs. They were in nursing, occupational therapy, and the physician assistant programs in Indiana University. We had a total of 319 learners who participated in a study on the impact of teamwork training and we used the same virtual simulation for all the groups. At that point in time we were working with a collaborative, some of the members we probably already know and actually one of whom this talk is in the memoriam of Barbara Truman. So we looked at the change in their teamwork attitudes while for the most part it was interesting to see that there were significant changes in all teamwork domains and there were small changes. But when we looked at the groups by profession we found that the baseline and the post-training attitudes really differed significantly by their profession. So this gave us some pause and it certainly seemed like it was not a one-size-fits-all for sure but we started to think about it. So the baseline attitudes could potentially be explained by the fact that the nurses and the occupational therapists may have been socialized towards more supportive behavior and work in teams whereas the physician assistant students maybe tended to work more on their own or with a particular physician but it didn't fully explain the differences in outcomes for learners with the same baseline. So on this next slide you'll see that there were learners that started out pretty much in the same spot but then had a more dramatic increase in their performance have been encountered the same simulation. So professional identity has been really conceptualized as the knowledge of challenges and opportunities that are typical within a profession as well as the individual choices that a person might make in their decision making and their behavior. And when we think about the scenario-based you know professional simulations what they do is they provide learners with an effective method to really explore the roles and the responsibilities of their profession as well as others. However we need to be careful about thinking about you know how we conceptualize these training scenarios and this comes in with the design process so the scenarios have that potential to create but they also have the potential to reinforce certain professional identity and stereotypes and influence professional collaboration either in a productive or in a restrictive way but it's not just about professional identity in virtual simulations on public and global health that we created here in Open Simulator but we've explored the impact of environment and health and you know social and environmental factors you know also play a role in the design of simulations for use by learners in settings particularly those with limited resources. So as we know the learning outcome depends greatly on the design of the experience and Matt and I are working together on a new project funded by the National Institutes of Health to develop mobile virtual simulations that will train healthcare workers on how to provide essential newborn care in low resource settings. So while we're just getting started on that work we thought we'd share some of our early lessons learned and we'll be brief as I know we're the only thing standing between you and the after party but I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Matt. Hi so I'm going to talk to you very briefly about some of the high level considerations to be thinking about when designing educational virtual simulations. So next slide please thank you so the first thing you need to do is bring your team together and it's important that you have a wide variety of skill sets on this team so one of the most important is of course your technical team so that would include your programmers your world builders your your artists all the people that need to actually build the thing but those builders don't necessarily kind of know what to do they so they need there needs to be some direction involved and for that you need to you need to have those managerial people involved too so people like the designers producers whatever synonym you have for that general role that knows how to bring it all together and knows how to how to develop and design and make something good but even if you have all those those you know the technical or the managerial the designing people they don't necessarily know what to make so it for whatever educational application you're trying to build you need to know your material backwards and forwards backwards and forwards otherwise you'll never be able to design anything and that's where you need your subject matter experts you need to be working closely with them throughout the entirety of your design process or if you don't have access to that it takes research research research research to it's a long drawn out process to actually to know your material well enough to properly design and teach for it so next slide so as once you have your team together as soon as you possibly can you need to define your goals and objectives for the project now I want to draw a distinction between the goals of the goals of the application versus the learning objectives to be completed within the application so like Rachel said we are creating a virtual learning tool to teach essential newborn care in low resource settings so the goals of the project would be in that case would could include making the material more accessible to a wider variety of people or making the material immersive to include to improve the quality of the learning but the learning objectives among other things could include how to resuscitate a baby or how to recognize the different danger signs and when it comes to the learning objectives it's also important that you be as specific as you possibly can so seeing you'll you need to teach the learners need to learn how to resuscitate a baby that's one thing that's good what's better is if you can say okay the learning objective is to for the learner to know to hold the cup the baby's head in a this very specific way and keep a tight seal with your fingers all over the baby's face to make sure air doesn't leak so that level of specificity that's how you properly know what it is you need to be developing because if you don't have those objectives defined your game is I promise you from experience doing this poorly your game your application is going to be a mess if you can't define these the next slide know your audience I have been involved in projects where people just want to write it off as yeah the the experience the simulation is for anyone we'll just teach anyone who's interested in learning and though that's our audience no your audience is not anyone you have to worry about you know age age groups and how you are going to talk to them you need to know what it is they know what what knowledge they're lacking what you know what their base knowledge is where to build from any physical characteristics you know are they hard of movement hard of hearing anything anything like that just the more you can the more you can know and define your learners the easier it will be to make your design decisions next slide now obviously you're going to need to be able to teach your material but it's also important to think about how you're going to assess the material because it's important to include that in that assessment portion to make sure that you're actually teaching the the material properly and make sure that your learners have effectively learned it so it's what that assessment will look like will vary from by your application but it's important to take to take steps throughout your experience to kind of allow the user to evaluate how they're doing next slide yeah allowing the user to evaluate how they're doing comes dines into the feedback it's important that you provide feedback throughout the experience so that the user knows you know knows that they're on the right track or not and can evaluate how how much they're actually understanding making sure they're understanding properly versus how they think they're doing so this can be rather tricky to accomplish this a great deal of research to be done here but it's important to be doing anyway yeah next slide so when you when you're designing a virtual simulation you have a number of different medium options these could be mobile based computer based even within a computer you have could have a standalone application it could be in a medium such as open sim or each of these different mediums has their pros and their cons and so it's really important that you understand the limitations and possibilities for your for your medium and make sure they align properly with your learning objectives and the goals of your project with these mediums they have a tendency to look like video games well both in terms of their appearance but also their functionality the mechanics tend to be aligned now this can be tricky for particularly for video game novices because not only are they having to learn the material but they don't have the same level of experience with the medium so they're having to learn that at the same time so I come from a game background I've developed video games I grew up playing video games I know I know that how how all this works so when I'm designing I'm oh every single time I design something new I'm surprised by what people get confused by I always try my best to make decisions that will be obvious and intuitive to novices but in some ways or another I always tend to be wrong about one thing or another so it just goes to show you have to be really mindful and careful about how you design your experiences and then on further to include these novices and then the gamers they they're going I assure you they're going to look at your experience and they're going to want to think of it like a video game and if depending on what you're trying to do maybe you're trying to gamify your learning maybe you want to but many times it's not a video game and so they're going to kind of tear it apart complaining but yeah just keep that in mind next slide so ultimately what you need is a design product so that could look like that could be a flowchart it could be a storyboard or any number of things but really what's what you need what's important is to be able to describe and visualize exactly what your game is going to look like and how it's going to work or not game your application is going and as extreme a detail as you possibly can if you can't do that then you've still got decisions to make and you don't have a complete design next slide yeah questions thank you are there any questions from our audience haven't seen any come in but there's been some wonderful conversation about your thoughts and Rachel's been answering or exchanging information if there are no questions Rachel did you have any final thoughts before we wrap well thank you all for being here and for listening I just think I did on my last slide this acknowledgment of the impact that our dear friend Barbara Truman had on my thinking around this area and transdisciplinarity and you know how learners you know can be designed for as well as you know how we can work together in groups to design for learners of different professions that's a wonderful sentiment and that this is our last presentation to just give another call out to the wonderful work in memory thank you Rachel and thank you Matt for such a great presentation as a reminder to our audience we want you to check out the conference.opensimulator.org to see what is coming up on the conference schedule following this session at 6 0 5 p.m. we will celebrate another successful conference at the dream pop rave at Pirates of Tall on the Digi World's grid and dance to the music of DJ Stranek also we encourage you to visit the OSCC 21 poster expo in the OSCC expo 3 region to find accompanying information on presentations and to explore the hyper grid tour resources in OSCC expo 2 region along with our sponsor and our crowd funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC expo regions thank you again to our speakers and to you the audience