 Hello everyone and welcome to the 7am to 7.30am session of the 2019 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session we are happy to introduce a presentation called Taking Stock of Proven and New Educational Simulation Use Cases. Our speaker today is Kay McLeanon. Please check out the website at conference.opensimulator.org for speaker bios details of sessions and the full schedule of events. Thank you, son. Good morning. Kay McLean, I was going to give you a little bit of an intro too, Kay. Let me let you continue. Kay is a professor of practice at the Tulane University School of Professional Advancement. She created the Tulane SOPA Metaverse and has been creating and using virtual world learning simulations in online economics and business studies courses since 2008. Kay uses a student feedback thing to continually refine and expand the educational simulation she creates for use in her e-courses. For more information on Kay's work, please see this website, which I will post for you in local here as well, just to make sure everybody's got it, and that's sopamedaverse.wp.tulane.edu. Well, this session is being live streamed and recorded, so if you have questions or comments during this session, you may send your tweets to atopensimcc with the hashtag pound oscc19. Welcome, everyone, and let's begin the session. Okay. Thank you, son, and thank you to everyone who is an early bird riser today to attend this session. On the screen now, I've got the bare bones agenda for what we're going to talk about. I thought a review of the Opensim Educator Affordances could be useful. Also, I wanted to detail some particulars about the educator learning simulation use cases that I have found to be proven, and when I say proven, I mean learn or feedback proven. Also, it's an important development, or I should say multiple developments in Opensim capabilities and options. And then I thought it might be worthwhile to take a look at what is the common denominators for effective learning simulations, and then close with a discussion of what might be considered at least fixable, but nonetheless impediments to the wider educator use of Opensim and also even VR and all virtual simulations. But before we get started, I wanted to call your attention to the Mentimeter poll that I have set up, and I've just got two questions set up in this poll, and the speakeasy HUD, I realized I corrected the slide this morning, but I didn't correct the text in the speakeasy HUD. I just added the right code to the text chat, which is 83.96.88. And there's just two simple questions. I thought it might be fun towards the end to detail your findings. I haven't integrated this Menti poll into my presentation, but when I get to the end, I thought I'd tell everybody what the results were from the survey. And the first question is just asking you for your experience to find out where the audience is, and then I'll leave the second question towards the end. Looking first at the educator affordances in Opensim, I want to start with the bottom line first, which is that the most important affordance is how Opensim can easily be used by academics or non-developers, that is, to create and test simulations. And I'm going to repeat that. Opensim didn't exactly turn out to be what we all thought it would be, where online classes and online meetings would occur with educators across universities, within universities, in classes. In other words, the critical mass, you know, still, at least in my classes, is about one in three, where I would like it to be 100%. But that doesn't mean that there still aren't affordances that we need to keep in mind and take advantage of. So the first affordance is private grids, the ability to be completely FERPA compliant. Also, I can pre-create avatars for my students, pre-position avatars, pre-load their content into their avatar. The grids can be self-hosted or low-cost hosted. I mean, the cost of an Opensim island or region or even larger grid is ridiculously cheap these days. And of course, the scalability, the ability to duplicate and replicate every aspect of a simulation. There's an extensive array of free or creative commons content. For example, there are giveaways, educator giveaways that came from an early flip grid simulation on Expo Region 3, and you can see the coordinates on the screen now. There's also an educator commons in Wright Plaza. There are script recipes in the OS grid, and you can see the coordinates on the screen now. I'm bringing my speakeasy up to be in concert with what's on the screen. Turning next to the proven use cases for education simulations in Opensim, in-world meetups and discussions are the mainstay of virtual learning. Also, students can even collaborate in-world on the creation of content or just stage meetings for group project discussions. Still, in contrast to the empty building malady characteristic of the early use of Second Life, where colleges and universities built realistic but empty campus buildings, there are the sky's the limit options for other types of learning simulations. And again, I can't say this enough. We have only seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the types of learning simulations that can be easily staged and, most importantly, learned or tested in Opensim. Case studies, role play, and even the use of virtual world sets to make 360 video is possible. Simulated experiences, including experiences that are too dangerous or costly to stage in the real world, can be created in the platform. On the screen now is my prisoner's dilemma scenario, which is an example of how students can learn in groups about the bias against cooperation in society. And there clearly is nothing more effective than learning firsthand or having a demonstration of a particular concept or outcome. Content delivery through displays, working slideshows, vocabulary flashcards, and more have proven highly valuable to students. And the types of things that I first put in simulations like slideshows and vocabulary flashcards, I will confess I just put in as filler in the early days in Opensim, and they have turned out to be the most highly rated by my students. That is, students clearly find the immersive capability of viewing content and interacting with content in a virtual world to be something that grabs their attention, and that's why it's valuable to students. But beyond that, students can even test their knowledge with in-world quizzes that are easy to create. Now, moving on to less effective use cases, it wouldn't be fair if I didn't disclose what didn't work out for me, and what didn't work out or was not valued by students were elaborate long simulations. And on the screen now is my data detective game that takes up an entire island. It has extensive tutorial stations, an entire city, and an extensive game scenario. And in some, it turned out to be too time consuming. Still, once again, my ability to easily and inexpensively set up this extensive simulation that ultimately proved to be of little interest to students is really quite remarkable. Turning next to the new and emerging use cases, I believe we're at a turning point or an inflection point for OpenSim. At this very conference a year ago, my Tulane colleagues and I detailed how we're using VM where virtualized viewers to provide student with access to the Firestorm viewer, even on a low-end computing device like an iPad or smartphone. And if you have an interest in this use of OpenSim, you can go back to the video of that presentation from 2008. Now we have access to a VR-ready viewer. On the screen now are the virtualized viewer, and what you can see is I successfully tested the virtualized viewer on my iPhone and a 10-year-old iPad. So our VR-ready Firestorm viewer is something I've just started to experiment with, but my early review is that it has a lot of promise. Also, we have access to Scenegate, a streamlined viewer that one of my colleagues is going to be speaking about later today, and yesterday you heard about the fake VR Google Cardboard viewer, and when considering all of these new or soon-to-be-available VR capabilities in OpenSim, it's going to be expansive and increase the array of content and potential users that could in fact relaunch the platform back to the hype cycle for 2020 or 2021. Also, using in-world content out of world is a little used option in OpenSim. That is users can or educators can make custom graphic images, can make talking avatar, head video clips, once again set up sets for 360-degree video and more. So returning for a minute to the Mentimeter poll, once again the coordinates are 83, 96, 88, and let me get to that, and of course my text, the speakeasy text is wrong, and this time I'm just asking you what you think is the major limiting factor of virtual simulations, and again when I get to the end I'll detail the findings, or what you are finding in your work is the most limiting factor. So with all the affordances and use cases I've detailed, the next question is what is it about the different use cases that have staying power that is contributing to what is giving them their staying power, and in my view the main reason for the staying power of the different simulations that I found are extremely useful to students is that students can easily use them, students find them engaging, they find them and they find that they contribute to their learning outcomes. So I ask them to rate the simulations on engagement ease of use and contribution to learning outcomes. So and in terms of the staying power that's it in a nutshell, it's their usefulness to students. Now of course institutional culture is another factor in the past predominantly on-ground chalk and talk faculty or institutions had less interest in virtual learning, but as more and more programs moved online the use of virtual learning simulations has become of interest, yet if the culture of an institution is focused on what's the latest development or the new shiny technology, proven affordances of platforms like Open Simulator could possibly be passed over. Okay, quick note for you, a lot of us are running into problems with the mentee. It gets after you fill out the first slide, it gets to one that says to refresh, but it won't get past that. Okay, let me, I just, it just cleared up on mine. I don't know why. Okay, thank you, thank you son for jumping in. So again the main factor influencing the staying power of virtual simulations is listening to the findings that I've collected with learners. In turn the first step for being able to ascertain which simulations are valued by learners is to the ability to easily develop and modify simulations in world or the main feature of Open Sim. Again, I believe learner tested is the bottom line. So turning to the challenges of mainstreaming the use of virtual simulations, developing a more robust community of inquiry remains top on my list. We had the sled listserv when educators between 2008 and 2010 were mostly in Second Life and then when Second Life ended the educator discount, a large group moved to Open Sim, and we had a few different listserts that have since dissipated. Some of us are on Miwi and in Facebook, but I would love to explore with colleagues, you know, developing even more noncommercial communities of inquiry. Viewers are not LTI compliant for our learning management systems. Boy, wouldn't it be nice if we could just walk off the page into a simulation from our canvas or blackboard or desire to learn learning management systems? I'd like to see more up to date educational turnkey kits with animated mesh, for example. I'm saying here overcoming the trough of disillusionment, but perhaps Open Sim has kind of fallen off the hype curve. It would be nice if VR capabilities catapulted us back onto the trough of disillusionment. We use Zoom at my institution, and there was a layered application, I think it's called ZootUp, where you could use your Zoom platform to go into a virtual world, and it made me think that it would be nice if we thought about layering applications. That was talked about a little bit last yesterday in the discussion about HUDs and discourse, you know, layering different uses. And of course, we're going to have to wrap up now because of our time. Thank you. Thank you, son. Let me take a look and see. If anybody has a question to post in chat, I don't know if we have enough time, son. What we can do is, if you're willing to meet with them at your booth later, that might be the best way to do that, or if they want to IM you with their questions, that would be great. IM me sounds good. Real quick, our experience with virtual simulations, 24% in OpenSIM, 76% multiple, and the top factor is limiting. It's almost a third and a third and a third equipment needed, use difficulty, and faculty setting up. So cost fell off the scale. Thank you, everyone, and thank you to the conference facilitators. Well, thank you, Kay, for a terrific presentation. And as a reminder for our audience, you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org. And following this session, the next session begins at 7.30 a.m. in the same keynote region, and it's entitled Echo Voice for Open Simulator. Also, we encourage you to visit the OSCC 19 Poster Expo in the OSCC Expo 3 region to find accompanying information on presentations and to explore the hypergrid tour resources in OSCC Expo 2 region, along with the sponsor and crowd funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC Expo regions.