 Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 8 a.m. to 8 30 a.m. session of the 2017 Open Simulator Community Conference. As a reminder to our in-world and web audience, you can view the full conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org, and you can tweet your questions or comments to atopensim.cc or use the hashtag, hashtag OSCC 17. With this session, we're happy to introduce a terrific topic of creating case study educational simulations for in and out of world use. Our speaker today is Dr. Kay McClennan, and Kay is a professor of practice at Tulane University. Kay has been creating and using virtual world learning simulations in her online economics and business study courses since 2008. In particular, Kay uses student feedback to continually refine and expand the educational virtual world simulation she creates to use in her e-courses, to drill it down on which educational virtual world simulation students find the most engaging and most useful. Further, in addition to more than 10 years of experience developing and teaching online courses, Kay designed and directed an extensive two-year online course quality improvement initiative at Tulane University School of Professional Advancement. I'd like to welcome Dr. McClennan. Thank you, Meg, and thank you to everyone in the audience for your interest in educational case study simulations staged in a virtual world. As an overview of the presentation I'm going to make today, I want to discuss the affordances and mechanics of case study use, also detail the evolution of my case study use both in Second Life and OpenSim, provide the study findings for student reaction to in and out of world simulations, provide some how-to guidance for creating in-world and out-of-world case study simulations, and then provide the key takeaways and of course always the next steps. Starting with the affordances of case study use, there's greater engagement, students get practice analyzing problems, and in particular get practice making difficult decisions with ambiguous versus clear-cut scenarios. And then next, looking at my approach, I separate the case study scenarios into different segments and then use different virtual world stages for each segment. Also in-world, I use note card givers to provide the case study overview as well as the individual character views and motivations. And then finally, a key aspect of using case studies is providing students with discussion questions and in forcing students to react to more than one outcome. As you can see from the image on the screen now, my initial case study build was in Second Life using Todd Borsch's prim-based shop assistance. When it came time to update those simulations in OpenSim, one of the things that clued me into the need for updating them was a flip phone that was on one of the desks in the simulation. I elected to use NPCs, non-player characters, and in particular, I have been using Nora Nooks and Aak Ardbark's kit, and it includes a poseball script written by Anne Comie. There's also a copy of this kit in my speaker booth, number 22 on Expo Island, number 3. While updating the different scenario builds, it occurred to me that I have enough virtual world space in OpenSim to leave a second empty set build for students to act out their own versions of the case studies. Also of greater importance, it occurred to me that I can become the different characters and video clip these narratives for out-of-world use. Another option, one that I thought would be more dramatic, was to rig the mesh models that I leave out around my virtual world educational simulations to avoid the empty virtual world syndrome, but I understand that the rigging process is quite time consuming, and this expectation was confirmed by Marcus Llewell, who rigged the OSCC Hippo using not one but two different programs. Still, even though I was not able to take advantage of a more dramatic approach to case study use, my guess is that there's many others in the audience that do have the skills to rig mesh models. So next I want to talk about a student reaction to virtual world use, and in particular case study use, but I thought it's first worth noting how faculty and students have different onboarding challenges when it comes to virtual world use. That is, it's much easier to be a student touring around different virtual world simulations than it is to be a faculty member creating those simulations while managing a grid, managing avatar creation, managing avatar troubleshooting, and more. So again, as you might imagine, students find course related virtual simulations to be of keen interest. In terms of their specific reaction to a virtual world use or optional educational simulations, one student says, I think it's an awesome addition. I love the idea of real time discussions. Another says, this is my second experience in the virtual world, and I think it should be offered in every class. It makes the class more interesting. Another student says, the virtual world presentations were more interesting and caused me to want to read and learn, and these type comments and reactions were reflected in the comments I received on staging case studies in a virtual world. So next, looking specifically at student participation rates in voluntary virtual world activities, I find that about 38% of the students in my online courses express an interest in this type activity, but only 33% actually take part in these activities. So after updating and expanding my case study bills and usage, I wanted to find out how many of my students view my new and improved case studies to be of more keen interest and, more importantly, would motivate higher participation rates. So using a Likert scale for agreement, I asked students if they would be interested in touring in-world case studies, would be interested in viewing out-of-world video clips, dramatizations of the same case studies, or third and or third, taking part in acting out the different scenarios. My expectation was that I would find about 33% to 38% of the students would continue to be interested in touring the in-world simulations, while maybe some more would like to participate in the out-of-world simulations. Well, I'm here to say the findings startled me. I couldn't believe that the students expressed such a high level of interest, 70%, for both touring in-world and out-of-world. And I'll confess that I now wonder if my questions were poorly constructed. But I think the bottom line, the takeaway here, is that college students aren't interested in participating in virtual world simulations, and it's incumbent upon myself and other educators to figure out how to make virtual world simulations more readily available to college students and make them engaging and useful within the parameters of online or other face-to-face courses. The final finding here about students' interest in acting out the different simulations, while significantly lower at 46% of the students, really, quite frankly, I think that's a high number as well. So turning next to the reasons why students don't participate, or the explanation between 70% versus 33% of their actual participation rate, as anyone might guess, students say it's too time-consuming or they don't have time to participate. Also there is about 12% of the students, and 12% to 15% has been pretty constant throughout the years that I've been teaching within virtual world. But there's something that this particular graph doesn't capture, and that's the how much points or how much course deliverable credit students can get for participating in the virtual world. I have found that 5% of the grade deliverables in the course allocating that much to a virtual world is too little as students just don't feel like it's worth their time. And further, about 15% of the graded deliverables in the course being allocated to optional virtual world activities yields about the 33% that I experience now each day, each semester or course that I offer this type of learning. So turning next to a little bit of how to, as I said before, I use these little backdrop segments for each segment of the case studies that I create. And it's not much of a giveaway, but I made a little mock version and left this giveaway at my Booth 22. Again, I use Nora Nook's MPC kit, and after the segments are set up, the note cards are written, and the MPCs added, I find my content for the different backdrop sets from all around the different freebie shops and destinations in our hypergrid connected metaverse. On the screen I've included Leighton Majorum's article, My Favorite Shopping Places on the Hypergrid. You can find that in Hypergrid Business. And of course I want to give a plug for the Educator Common Shop on Wright Plaza and really all the shops on Wright's Plaza. So turning next to making out of world video clips for out of world use, when I assume the identities of the characters in my case study, I use Morph Box Pro software to morph my voice into different characters. This particular software package is fairly inexpensive, about $40, and it comes with 25 preset voice morphine options. For the actual video clip creation, I use Camtasia Studio, and this software package comes with or offers a one month free trial. What I do is take a screen capture image of the set that I'm highlighting and then draw a box around the character and embed the video clips in that right where the little arrow is in the image in my learning management system course. So in terms of the takeaways from both, you know, my research survey findings and evolution of case studies, most of the students in my college level courses, and this includes both traditional aged and non-traditional aged students, welcome the added engagement possible from virtual world learning simulations. Still students need more streamlined access to virtual world simulations, and I need to evaluate more what is the threshold for how much of the course deliverables will yield higher participation levels. But at the same time there is a lot of student interest, it appears that there's a segment of the student population, as I indicated before, about 12% that's quite opposed to this type of technology. So I'm going to stick a pin in this finding because I wonder if part or all of this segment of students could be influenced by peer pressure to participate in virtual world learning simulations. So for my next steps, I want to resurvey students to find out through different construction of questions, whether I wrote those questions right and could find sort of pinpoint which segment of students want to participate in world versus out of world. And also, and I sort of feel like a broken record in this regard, I feel as though we need viewer capabilities that can be integrated into our learning management system. Canvas as a learning management system that's growing exponentially in higher education includes a feature where external tools and APIs can be integrated right into the viewer. And I'm not sure how or this could be accomplished from the standpoint of viewer creators or maybe even jury rigged to be able to be included right in the LMS. This is what I think is going to really advance student use and faculty use as well of virtual world educational simulations. I'm going to stop there and hope that there might be a few questions and that we have time for questions. We do have some time for questions and I do have a couple already. The first one is from Alba and she says, when you say rigmesh models, do you mean the NPCs? No, the NPC kit that Nora and others have made available is so easy to use. You dress your avatar in whatever costume you want and create the pose ball, put the script in, put the animation you want the NPC to be posed with and then touch that ball and it makes a copy of your avatar. The mesh models, you would have to rig them and then wear them as an avatar. I hope that answers the question. Delightful had a comment and she said it makes her wonder about creating support for immersive learning digital literacies. She says it suggests more access to persistent digital learning commons that include simulation. I couldn't agree more. My whole focus working in virtual world is to figure out which types of simulations students find engaging and useful. Having and holding discussions in the world is a great option but when you're staging an asynchronous online course, students, it's very hard to figure out a time when either the whole class or even large groups of the class can meet in world. So students demand asynchronous types of activities and quite surprisingly, happily surprising to me, they do find individual activities like vocabulary note card, games, other types of simulations, 3D graphs that can move around with a puppeteer script, things like that to be quite useful. So it's all about figuring out how we can use this platform to the best advantage of our students. We have a question from Kony, basically saying is there a canvas LTI for VR? Not that I know of and I know that none of our current viewer singularity firestorm on look are able to be integrated into canvas. But boy, I'll tell you, this would be, this is the holy grail for those of us teaching online and in virtual worlds at the same time. If we could integrate a viewer into the canvas LMS, that would be tremendous. One last question from Sally, she says, is that kit open source and have you found that there are shareable, are they shareable for export to say homeschool teachers and families? Sally, if you get one of the kits and there's more kits from Nora that I found on the Saris Island in the Franco grid and I see something, I lost it track of it in the chat about Nora's region, how she has more kits there. I'm not sure if they're exportable because I had a hard time finding one that I could put out for folks to grab. But the Creative Commons license or whatever license is being issued on, it should be in the box and you can, I am Nora Malone or Nora Nook directly as well to find out. But the thing about Creative Commons licenses, I guess everybody knows this, is that while you can use it for your own nonprofit use in general, if you're talking about exporting it for something that you're going to sell, that's kind of a different matter altogether. So anyway. I just want to ask one last question here. We have from Bethany, she's asking, what do you say to faculty who express an interest but wonder about the time commitment that it is involved with something like this? In the past, gosh, maybe eight years ago, starting eight years ago or so, I started holding some different faculty workshops and I got some interest, but no sustained interest. But then recently, one of our faculty members used OpenSim, our grid in a contest at a conference and one second prize. And she had three weeks lead time to practice and use it. So I'm beginning to reassess my thinking that fact that it's two time consuming for faculty. But I do believe that there's so much content now in OpenSim. So many folks, the conference organizers and steering committee have been in virtual worlds for a lot longer than I have. So they know as well as I do. I guess I came into OpenSim about 2010 and there was very little content here now. That has changed and there's plenty of educational objects and, you know, sets already pre-designs. Yeah. Well, Dr. McLennan, I want to thank you very much for your presentation. It was very stimulating and I think give people a lot of ideas of how they can use the things that you talked about. And Meg, thank you. And again, thank you to everyone in attendance. All right. As a reminder to our audience, you can see what's coming up in the conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org. Following this session, our next session begins at 8 30 a.m. It's the economy of appreciation and OpenSim. HG Safari, you've heard about it a few times in other people speaking. It'll be fun. Also, I want to encourage you to stop by all of our expo regions to check out all of our different presenters. And we'll talk to you in a little bit.