 Welcome to the 5.30 to 6.00 p.m. session of the 2020 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session, we are happy to introduce a presentation called Using Browser-Based Virtual Environments as a Gateway Drug to Get People Hooked on Virtual Worlds. Our speakers this evening are Dr. Marie Vanz, better known as Am Vanz Lapis, and Bethany Winslow, better known as Bethany Winslow. Dr. Vanz is a senior research scientist for HP Labs, HP Incorporated, and an instructor at San Jose State University. And Bethany is an instructional designer at San Jose State. Please check out the website at conference.opensimulator.org for speaker bios, 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 atopensimcc with the hashtag, hashtag OSCC20. Welcome, everyone, and let's begin the session. Well, thank you for the introduction, Scott. Hey, everyone. We know you must all be wondering what is up with us, crazy cats, and our theme for this presentation. In a nutshell, we're going to talk about what we're doing to lure people into the incredible wonderland of virtual worlds. And we want to talk a little bit about why we think that browser-based environments can be an excellent and easy sort of gateway drug, one that we hope gets people hooked and coming back for more functionality. Our Alice in Wonderland theme is relevant because the characters from this story offer useful insights about identity and change, and this is very much akin to what educators grapple with in terms of adopting technology and learning to teach in new ways. Marie, can you drive the next slide? Thank you. Many of us have long been trying to find ways to entice our colleagues to see the value of virtual worlds, but showing them machinima and referencing the research literature is not enough to get them to take the leap into this environment. And what we really want to do is get them to come down the rabbit hole with us. We know the investment of time required to actually experience the power of these environments. And that needs to happen to hook people. So when I started playing with Mozilla Hubs, I was intrigued because it's a free open source platform that works on any device, even a phone. You can easily create a virtual environment to share with others and it's social in nature. When I created my own account earlier this year, it's not a coincidence I chose the Cheshire Cat as my avatar. He offers one of the most important insights about this vast and confusing wonderland of options here in OpenSim. And that is, if you don't know where you want to go, it really doesn't matter what direction you choose. And that, my friends, is the real dilemma because we know that when people are overwhelmed with options, it's just plain easier to make no choice at all. So this is a problem for virtual world adoption. People don't know where to go or even how to start. And even what to do here if they do get here, because it's just so completely foreign to them. Even though everyone we know is sick of Zoom meetings, we can't wait for people to become interested in virtual worlds. That day is never going to come. So I just decided to just start making a few Hubs rooms proactively this semester for a few people. And it's quick and easy enough for me to create a room. So why not just hand out a few rooms with a page in Canvas that tells someone and their students how to use it. But it remains to be seen who comes back for more and wanting more functionality. I have started hearing some feedback indicating that our addiction model might really work. And so great. This is the slide. Thanks, Marie. So for example, one of the first people that I wanted to work with who teaches photojournalism, normally his students, their final showcase, they go on a wall in the journalism building on campus. And I knew this semester because we're 100% online. Those pictures were just going to end up on a web page somewhere. And that's super boring. It's a small class. There's only 15 people. So I just had him send me the pictures and I just pinned them up in a couple of connected rooms. Well, Dr. Cheers just reported to me that his students and he were really excited to view their work in a very professional looking 3D art gallery where they could navigate with each other and see their work. And they saw their names as featured artists. Dr. Cheers told me students describe the gallery as cool and interactive and creative, and they can send the link to meet a family member or friend in there to show them what they're doing. So it's a lot more accessible to people than when it's on campus. So Dr. Cheers reports that, and this is a quote, all of the students are excited to explore Mozilla Hubs. And pinning up those images myself was a lot easier than trying to convince him or anyone really to build it themselves. Hubs is easy, but we have got to get people to really experience the power of a customized virtual environment for themselves before they'll invest the time to do more to create their own. So I'm focused on just giving people virtual rooms. In fact, I recently installed a Hubs instance on AWS for a large event for our College of Business. And I created 43 rooms, one for each of the teams of students so that conference guests who wanted to talk to that particular team could jump into their room and chat with them. And this was just the networking coffee break hour. It was part of a day-long, like, 400-person event that was on Zoom. Now, of course, the coffee break is not 100% attended, but I had a bunch of people helping me moderate as room hosts. But the feedback that I got from everyone was that everyone who did attend the coffee break sessions loved them. In fact, when I first showed the Mozilla Hubs to the events team at San Jose State University, the people who actually managed the Zoom portion of the event, they were absolutely blown away. They'd never seen anything like it. And they loved it so much, they asked me for a room of their own to have their weekly team meetings. And they planned to show it to other people who are looking for alternatives to Zoom. So that's promising. So here's my thoughts so far from a bunch of different times getting people into Hubs. And I'm not exaggerating. When I describe grown-ups, adults, not students, this is faculty and staff, they get downright giddy. They are excited to change their avatars. They giggle wildly when they're in a group. They literally run around excitedly. In fact, one of the very first things someone from the events team asked me was if they could click on the model of the coffee bar to sit themselves down or animate their avatar to make it look like they were drinking a coffee. Other people asked me if they could make their avatar dance. In other meetings, I heard people say they wished they could cam around and see their own avatars. Believe me, I took note of all of this with great interest. I thought to myself, well, that was fast. And I tell everyone that browser-based environments are just the first step. And that there are more robust environments when they're ready to take the tumble down the rabbit hole with us. And this next slide here, I'm going to wrap this up with something I'm currently working on for the spring semester, which also, I think, follows our model of luring people in. And in this instance, I am going straight to the students who will often do anything for extra credit. And I finally got my own Kitely World, and I have a lot of different things in the works. But I stumbled upon this incredible build. Josh Bohm, big props. And can you believe the coincidence that I actually have an instructor, yes, who teaches cruise ship operations and management in the hospitality department in the College of Business at San Jose State University? And I have a great working relationship with him because I helped revise his course to be 100% online two years ago, and I had a hand in tweaking the curriculum quite a bit. So Rick is excited about my plans. I'm creating an extra credit activity for his students, which will have them be investigators for the cruise ship company. And they're gonna explore various areas of the ship and reflect on the information there, specifically about how COVID-19 has impacted and will continue to challenge the cruising industry. Students will create a field study report that documents their reflections with screenshots and whatnot. And so I'm working on this now. It's gonna go live at the end of January. But now let's turn this over to Marie. Okay, hi, you can hear me, right? Great, okay. So my name is Marie Vans in the physical realm and Anne Vans Lapis in the virtual world. I just recently finished teaching a course at the San Jose State University High School on Design for Teaching and Learning in Social Virtual Reality. I'm going to show you an example of using browser-based and easy-to-use virtual worlds to get students hooked on using 3D worlds to deliver education and training. I had two student learning outcomes defined for this course. Number one, to evaluate and apply technical criteria to state-of-the-art learning platforms for digital archives or special collections because I'm in the high school. And two, understand learning models and how they can be applied using novel learning technologies by developing curricula and designing experiences based on learning models applied to archives of special collections. Okay, so I'm going to describe how I went about that. It all starts with the top criteria for VR platforms. And I believe Ellie talked about this earlier that the survey that we did a little over a year ago where we started out with 29 criteria, but after analyzing the results we were able to identify eight that were clearly the most important. As you can see from the slide, it includes things like in-world speech, ability to present slides and having desktop top access among others. The bulk of their grade is on a design project for an educational experience of their choice. They learned about models for learning such as situated learning and constructivism. And they were required to discuss the learning model their designs were based on. They had to think about how they would measure learning in their design, what content they needed, what problem they were addressing and the costs. There was much more they needed to have in their designs, but a large part of the design document had to include schematics of how their chosen experience would look once it was implemented. I will show you a couple of those examples in a minute. So armed with this knowledge and the criteria, the students explored different social VR platforms. We started with Verbella as this has the easiest user interface and requires no prior experience with 3D worlds. I had one student who was older and it was not a gamer. So this was a very gentle introduction to VR worlds for him. I met up with students twice a week on Friday and Saturday mornings in one of the chosen worlds. So I could show them around, ask them to consider whether the particular world we were in addresses those criteria we talked about earlier. After Verbella, we went to Mozilla Hubs and Frame. The next two field trips were Science Space and finally Kitely. I saved Kitely for last because I knew it would blow them away after visiting the other platforms. I should mention that while I let the students know they are free to explore worlds not on our list like VR Chat, Engage and Alt Space, I could not require them to go because all the software and programs that we require students to use have to work on both Macs and PCs. And unfortunately, unless you have a wireless headset, none of the platforms mentioned above will work on Mac OS. So here's a schematic, some of the images from the design of one of my students called Biography of the Book. And he chose Kitely for his platform which was very surprising to me because he was the one I mentioned above who had zero experience with 3D or gaming. He found a working 3D model of a Gutenberg press and all the other objects he needs to implement his experience. What was amazing was that after visiting all the other worlds, he immediately saw the trade-offs between the easier but less interactive platforms and the higher learning curve but more flexibility available in Opensim. Throughout the course, I emphasized that they needed to think about how effective their design would be on their learners. For example, if the experience is mostly passive like watching lectures and maybe watching YouTube videos then maybe all they need is a 360 video or even Zoom. They had to think about the affordances of the platform they were exploring so they could justify the use of that platform. It makes no sense to spend time and money to create an elaborate build where no objects are interactables and it just basically a tour. While there is a cool factor there in VR is clearly not, there's no evidence that it leads to better learning. So here's another example from a different student who is a librarian for NASA. She created two rooms and this is only one in frame to educate student and teachers about encouraging women to consider STEM careers. Oops, sorry, wrong thing. I have to say this is one of my favorites as well because it's a subject I care deeply about myself. But here I wanted to point out that her experience does lend itself to a more passive learning experience by using frame which is web base. So she can easily expose her target learners to the content she wants them to absorb without distractions from the technology itself. While the target audience for the biography of the book experience were tech savvy students the audience for the women in STEM experience is K to 12 teachers and students who may or may not have the technical skills or the time to learn those skills for a foreign experience that's mostly watching videos and reading note cards. So to wrap up, I'd wanna just leave you with some main takeaways for me after the opportunity to teach this course. First, as we saw with my inexperienced student if you start easy and progressively show the power of these 3D environments, people will gain more confidence and be motivated to jump over the larger hurdles to create the learning experiences they want. Second, I met my students and let them direct the discussion. Mostly I asked the questions. For example, what types of learning experiences will be perfect on the platforms we are exploring? What about the criteria? Does this platform address those? Last but probably most important, allow them to choose the domain and the experience they are most interested in implementing. This will be, they will be more motivated because their hearts are really in it. Thanks much and please feel free to reach out to us to connect. Enjoying the VR Exploders Club. That's true, that's true too. We have a lot of fun. I'll second that, yes, by all means. Thank you Marie and Bethany for such a terrific presentation. Now, as a reminder to our audience, you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org. Following this session, the next event will be at six o'clock in the music region and will feature country rock singer Liberty Bell Lyric. Also, we encourage you to visit the OSCC20 poster expo and the OSCC Expo 3 region to find accompanying information on presentations and explore the hyper grid tour resources in OSCC Expo 2 region, along with sponsor and crowd funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC Expo regions. Thank you again to our speakers and to you, the audience.