 Hello everyone and welcome to the 1.30 to 2 p.m. session of the 2023 Open Seminar Community Conference. In this session we are pleased to introduce the presentation Building Empathy in the Virtual World. Our speakers are Elaine Hotter and Jeremy Finkelstein. Dr. Hotter is a senior lecturer at Talpiat College in Holon. She is known for her innovative approach to teaching, which focuses on creating inclusive and diverse learning environments. Jeremy has been developing virtual world environments for education since 2006. He specializes in creating interactive environments designed to assist and further the educational process with fun and immersive content. Please check out the website found at conference.opensimulator.org for speaker bios, details of the sessions, and the full schedule of events. This session is being live streamed and recorded, so if you have any questions or comments during the session, you may send tweets to atopensimcc with the hashtag pound oscc23. Welcome everyone, let's begin the session. Hi everybody. My name is Elaine and this is Jeremy and we're really excited because it's the first time we're presenting here for you in this conference even though we've been on OpenSim for a long time. Jeremy, will you tell everyone when you began? Yeah, a long time ago. As Elaine said, this is our first time presenting at the conference, so just be gentle with us. A long time I've worked on many different projects evolving over time into much more full blown courses, one of which we're about to speak about. Okay, so let's speak about it. So let's go to the first slide. We were given a job, basically, to write a MOOC. I don't know how many, if you're familiar with it, it's a massive open online course. We worked for edX in Israel, and I was just so thinking about, oh no, these MOOCs are terrible, they just see videos, the learners are passive, the pedagogy isn't new, and most students don't even complete the course. So I started to think of a way to make it different, to take it from what's called a MOOC, to a MOOV. In other words, a massive open online virtual environment. And so that's basically what we did. And the topic was intercultural education. Next slide. So if you can all please click on your screen and get to see the promo demo. Everyone is talking about multiculturalism and cultural diversity. Everyone is talking about multiculturalism, but talking about it is one thing, and experiencing it is another. Welcome to Introduction to Multiculturalism, the first MOOC in the world to use a unique interactive system that allows you to create a virtual character who can see, experience, talk, talk with, meet, and get to know people from other cultures in real time. This groundbreaking new course creates a world of learning experiences with simulations and role plays. You get to feel how it is to be someone else. The team of course developers include experts from eight institutions of higher education from different religions and cultural backgrounds. We invite you to join this unique interactive course, Introduction to Multiculturalism, all through the experience of an avatar. Register now. When Jeremy built the world, he built into areas where six students would work together. So we open many worlds at the same time. Can we go to the next one? Now, the whole thing about developing empathy is interesting and we have people done it in the past. The idea of the course is to teach intercultural education. But within it, we wanted to use the virtual world to experience everything. But up until then, people talk up until the type of thing we're talking about, people said, okay, if we're going to learn about empathy, let's say we're going to learn about tribes in Africa or whatever. So you learn about them, you watch videos about them, you could actually bring someone into the classroom to meet, you could have a project when you learn with the children or the students from that particular country. But what we're talking about is the last thing where not only can the groups be intercultural, but you actually get to experience what it's like to be somebody else. Next slide. So we took it in stages. The students shared personal experience, maybe it was about bullying or things like that. Then they had simulations and role plays in the virtual world, followed by interactive explanations and summaries, videos. And yes, fine, exactly, Lisa, you're great. And then we had reflection with yourself and also with the rest of the group and a discussion on the process that you went through. I think it will be clearer when you see a video about it. Can we have the next slide? Right, this is the main video. So if you can watch this video all of you, and I think it will be much clearer. We live in a more global world, yet prejudice and racism is on the rise. How do the students in this course acquire the skills for cultural competence, awareness and understanding the other? In order to accept and understand the other, it's not enough to learn about them, to learn about the problems, the difficulties they face. We should be able to walk in their shoes and experience their lives. When we experience, we remember. We can experience, for example, what it's like to be disabled and discuss how we felt. We can be in a simulation where we become someone else. For example, a Syrian refugee in Europe. When we get to hear how people relate to us and don't accept us. Another example is becoming obese. Your avatar suddenly becomes really fat in a world where everyone is thin. These experiences form a lasting impression on the participant's lives. The target audience is students at academic institutions, teachers, employees in the social sectors and the public at large. What's the impact? After three courses in our pilot, one in each language with 350 students, the test in qualitative data showed significant increase in empathy to others across the board, including different religions, cultural groups, LGBT and color. And a decrease in bias and prejudice and this change continued eight months after the completion of the course. Wow, really amazing. Look what the students are writing. So interesting. So in a nutshell, the students in this program learn about cultural diversity and experience it in the metaverse. They develop empathy for others and prejudices decrease. Well, it was great seeing you all come and drop by and visit us in the virtual world. Okay, let's continue. I just wanted to jump in before we continue while we're waiting for everyone to finish. We have a special person in the audience who I haven't seen for a while, but she created some of the avatars for this program and names Ada Radius here. So she did some wonderful work on our avatars here. Okay, so I think it's clear in the video we basically spoke about empathy and we'll talk a bit. I mean, we've mentioned a bit about the results, but it was really inspiring for us to see that the impact of these simulations, there were altogether five simulations within the course, were much more powerful than we could ever have imagined. Now one of the, we'd like to show you a part of one of these simulations, a bit different to the others because it was a matter of choice. You could choose three different options. I'll just explain just before it begins. The students, the people in the courses are actually people who are going to be teachers. And we wanted them to have some sort of experience about there's so many things can go wrong in the classroom and how you're going to deal in the classroom with the situations. I mean, they learn about how children see the word in black and white and not so many gray areas and it's I belong to a group or it's my group. And if you have glasses, you're not part of my group, you know, I had children work. And some people take it on to adulthood, which is a course of many conflicts but we won't go into that today. But what we want to show you in this short video is one of the options you could choose and what happens. So please click on the next screen. I don't want to sit next to a smelly black boy. Me either. I also don't want to. The teacher doesn't care about me. I was really offended and hurt. Now the other kids will be angry with me and won't want to talk to me. This teacher is forcing us to do things we don't want to. I don't want to sit next to him. He's disgusting. And the break will be enough. Why isn't the teacher angry and why doesn't the teacher do anything about what happened? It makes me feel really bad. As you saw in the video, the gift the child Rachel suffers herself from discrimination. And she's in a stage of survival herself. Remember that the attackers can also be in distress. On the one hand, do not compromise and do not give up. And on the other hand, support and be empathetic to all students. So you can see this is one of the three options. And we've got the kids replying, which you would never have in the classroom. You wouldn't really know what the kids are thinking and what's going on. It was enjoyable, I think, for the student teachers. They had two simulations like this and different experiences working with the class. And the fact that we had experts there all the time telling them, explaining that what that what happens in their choice and what's going on it obviously adds knowledge at the same time. But it's it's not just learning more. It's related to what you chose. It's more relevant to you personally. Well, in this with this course, there are seven units, each one talking by the different aspect of intercultural education. And the last unit, instead of having an exam, they have an escape room they need to get out of. And each room of the seven rooms deals with the material learned in that unit. So it demands that they really have to go over everything to the material beforehand. And as the students said, it's the first time they've come out of an exam smiling, because it was really a fun experience at the end, they get the certificate and they've got through it. A lot of fun things going on there at the same time. So and Jeremy, do you want to speak about we've got five minutes left. Yes, I just wanted to add some of the other things that they had to do and one that I particularly loved was we built a little area which was a town square and it had like a cinema and a post office and shops, etc. And the students had to each sit in a wheelchair and they were given like a list of tasks that they had to do like to do list, you know, go retrieve a package from the post office, etc. And they'd wheel around in their wheelchair and they'd find that it's incredibly difficult to get up into the post office because that day when they went there the ramp was closed for maintenance. For instance, they had to get on a bus, etc. And the students really felt like they were experiencing how difficult or somewhat how difficult it was to be in a wheelchair. And not just physically, right? Not just physically, emotionally, the way people treat you as if you don't exist and only speak to the person next to you or they speak to you as if you're very slowly as if you know you're mentally disabled as well. Right. And we've done research on this and maybe we should show the next slides. So the students had great things to say and if you're interested in the academic side we've published a few articles on this also in virtual reality. So this is like what the students feel that. Do you want to read it out? Yeah, I think like everyone can read it and I think I have to read it out. But the students all said that it was much easier to remember. And even though we asked students like a year and a year and a half after the course, they still even today, if you meet these students, they still convinced that they were disabled because of this experience. And just on the just the last note we're just just put the last slide. Actually, the course is up for for the reimagined education, which are the Oscars of Education taking place this week. It's got to the finals for the course that teaches values and ethics. So hopefully, who knows, we might even win. So we'll let you know. Wonderful. I think that's almost at the end. We've got one minute left, I think. So I just wanted to add that the course is also it's not just in the in the virtual world. They also use the MOOC for things as well. But when I was building it, we built an entire HUD around this so the students could see what they were meant to be doing and where to go and and all the experiences worked through the HUD and the database collecting data on what they what they did in the task so they could see what they've done and what they still have to do. It was a great experience working on this project. Yes, and we've got if you come to our post into our booth 17, there's all the material there that you've been asking about and more. So we'll be only too pleased if you come there. And if you're interested, I mean, it's open on edX. Anybody can take this course. Yeah. And one last thing. Tomorrow we have another presentation about one about other courses, which is teaching spoken English advanced spoken English in the virtual world. Thank you, Elaine and Jeremy for an informative and interesting presentation. I'm sure you saw in the comments and questions that Kaylee would like to see links to your papers. So if you have those in your booth, that'd be awesome. As a reminder to our audience, you'll want to check out the conference.opensimilar.org to see what's coming up on the conference schedule. You won't want to miss our next session, which begins at 2pm in the keynote region and it's entitled virtual vignette and the animaster unleashing the power of animash in open sim for education and entertainment. Also, we encourage you to visit the OSCC 23 poster expo in OSCC expo zone three region to find accompanying information on the speaker's content and explore the hyper grid resources in expo two along with the sponsor and crowd funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC expo regions. Thanks again to Elaine and Jeremy and to our audience.