 Reminder to our in-world and web audience, you can view the full conference schedule at conferenceopensimulator.org. This hour, we are happy to introduce a terrific session called Prisoner's Dilemma, Is Not the Instructor's Dilemma. Our speaker today is Kay McLennan. Kay is a professor of practice at Tulane University and teaches economics and business studies courses in a completely online format to part-time students at Tulane School of Continuing Studies. Kay's 3D virtual world education simulations were finalists in two federal virtual world challenges contests. In 2012 for her Prisoner's Dilemma game theory simulation and in 2013 for her data detectives game, Kay has a PhD in administration, curriculum, and instruction from the University of Nebraska. Welcome all. Let's begin the session. Good morning or good afternoon or good evening, depending upon where our attendees are. Can everyone hear me? I just wanted to do one quick voice check. I had a lot of lag there for a moment. Emil, can you hear me and Beth? Boy, I do have a lot of lag, but I'm just going to keep going on. It sounds like everybody can hear me. Again, thank you for attending. This morning I wanted to present about the Prisoner's Dilemma simulation that I'm giving away copies of. This is the first of two sessions on the same topic. Today will be, I'm waiting just a minute here to catch up on myself. Beth just suggested I need to mute one of my sources here, but I'm just going to continue on. I think this will work. Today's talk includes more background on the student survey data that is behind the Prisoner's Dilemma build and the reasons for giving away this simulation, as well as the reasons for suggesting a take part challenge. Tomorrow, the learning lab session will include some different aspects of the Prisoner's Dilemma giveaway, including tutorials and tips, some resources, a view of the 3D visuals that are going to be illustrated in my slides today, hands-on practice in the sandbox, and again, copies of the giveaway. The learning lab is Learning Lab 2 and is available for self-tour too. So looking more specifically at what I'm going to talk about for the next few minutes and then leave lots of time for questions, I wanted to talk about educators and students in virtual worlds, what I've observed over the last six years, the significance of the Prisoner's Dilemma giveaway, where to obtain the Prisoner's Dilemma components, how to play the game, the available lesson plans, student feedback, and virtual learning best practices. Again, a bit more about the take part challenge and then lots of time for questions and answers. So starting with a question of why should educators consider using virtual worlds, the simple answer and the main answer is to increase learning outcomes. Virtual world educator simulations are intrinsically immersive and engaging. Can facilitate activities that are too dangerous or difficult to this stage in real life are cost effective and once mastered, easy to use and almost infinitely customizable. Of course, it's not only from the standpoint of the educators, the more critical perspective is from the students view. And what I find is that students enthusiastically support the use of virtual world simulations. I have a few quotes up on the board. I'm not going to read through. And I will say as a disclaimer, I only offer a virtual world learning activities as an optional activity. And each semester, I get consistently one third to one half of the students in my different online courses that self-select themselves to participate in these learning activities. And so accordingly, since they self-select themselves for these learning activities, they're all enthusiastic about it. Standing back for just a second, I want to also address the question of why is OpenSim such a good fit for educators? And the slide you see up on the board now has way too much text. But I just kept thinking of more and more reasons why OpenSim is such a good fit for educators. So I included them all. And then finally, I just had to stop thinking of reasons. I ran out of room. Low cost is the first reason why OpenSim is such a good fit for educators. And as educators, clearly we have a fiduciary obligation to our institutions to go for the low cost option. Also, owing to the low cost, we can use a large number of islands and simulations, prems. And this is much better from a pedagogical standpoint. Also, we can make our islands private to customize hypergrid access. And when they're private and no other hypergrid visitors can hypergrid jump in, we can still be FERPA compliant but use our students real names. And of course, there's no if the island is private or islands or the grid is private, there's no chance of griefing or x-rated material. Also, via a web browser access, we can pre-create, pre-position, and pre-stock our student avatars. The next reason why OpenSim is such a good fit is our ability to save or an IAR files, an or file being an entire island, and an IAR file being an entire inventory. I have become so used to this particular option over the last few years that I cannot imagine ever going back to not being able to save content in islands. Our ability to rapid prototype. Our ability to influence platform development. I have to confess that when I was in Second Life for a number of years, I often felt like I was just a sheep following along with whatever was decided for us. And I definitely don't feel that way here. There's no mandatory upgrades in the middle of the semester that we have to negotiate with our IT folks. We have access to the hypergrid. And of course, another critical thing is that there's no cost uploads. We don't have to nickel and dime ourselves or our administrator to provide for texture and object uploads. Moving on to the significance of the Prisoner's Dilemma giveaway, the actual essence of the Prisoner's Dilemma simulation is a demonstration through participation of the bias against cooperation. And given the need for more global cooperation and the twin need for more turnkey virtual world educational simulations, giving away the simulation seemed like a natural. And over the last six years, I've certainly made good use of all of the generous giveaways in the OpenSim community. And I wanted to take my chance to give something back that I hope might be of use to educators. The simulation is student tested and also entails other virtual learning simulation best practices. And then finally, for me, I am only familiar with college level students in virtual worlds, and not K through 12. And while I wanted to give away a turnkey simulation with lesson plans, I wasn't sure whether K through 12 students might find a scenario where they were in jail to be too alarming. I thought about perhaps modifying it to include a school-aged detention scenario. But then I worried that that might be glorifying delinquent behavior. So it just seemed like a natural to throw open this talk and the learning lab session to modifications that other educators might come up with for changing the prisoner's dilemma simulation. To date, I haven't seen any modifications submitted. So I'm guessing that maybe I didn't give enough time or advertise widely enough. But maybe this is something that will happen in the future. And I do believe the idea of more audience participation in virtual world presentations is certainly a sound one. The or file can be found on the website that is now up on the board and also is available on Learning Lab Two Island and even the little stand that's on the top level of this breakout session. Looking at the components of the giveaway, there is a Riz box that provides the entire build. Now my original idea was that that would be something we could practice on in the sandbox. But then I realized that running scripts is not a permission that is practical to give to all the conference attendees. So feel free to take that back to your different grids to practice. But the attendees at tomorrow's session should have build privileges. I'll be sure of that. And all of the individual parts are included in the giveaway, so we can practice that. And again, I've got other tutorial displays that we'll walk around and see. Moving on to the materials, this is the part that I suggest you take a look at on the website under the page called Lesson Plans. I have provided information on what is a game, how is a game defined, the relevant vocabulary, how to motivate cooperation. Once an instructor demonstrates with their class the bias against cooperation, what is the strategy for overcoming this bias? And then answers and self-test materials. One of the best practices for higher education is to always provide an asynchronous option for different learning materials. Moving on to how to play the game, you'll see in the image in the screen there are two cells separated by an interrogation room. And each cell has a signaling device that is on a population students might like the most, including a free trade game where students each have their own island nation. And very quickly learned, they need to trade with one another to increase their GDP, dioramas, 3D economics models. All of these were rated in the 4.0 to 4.4 out of a 5.0 Likert scale. In contrast, items that I put into my builds as filler, including in-world slideshow resources, vocabulary flashcards, were rated at the highest level at 5.0. Another surprise to me was that students really liked the Meet the Economist series, where biographical materials related to different economists was presented. And then another, gender dynamics in the workplace. So it was clear that students, when it comes to gender dynamics in the workplace, liked learning about things that they could relate to in real life. So in building the Prisoner's Dilemma simulation, my approach was to layer the build to include both asynchronous and real-time learning activities, also to include interactive components, self-practice, and different learner materials, and of course, learner-relevant examples, including relevant historic figure life stories, in this case, John Nash. But continuing a little bit more on the theme of student feedback, one of the things that I have really found happily startling is that students really find virtual world learning activities to be more engaging and to increase their learning outcomes. Looking at engagement, students average, believe that classroom delivery on a 1 to 5 Likert scale, with 5 being the highest, believe classroom delivery has an engagement factor of 3.5. Looking at more traditional e-course delivery, students believe that the engagement factor is 4.1. And then finally, looking at virtual world delivery of learning materials, students believe that this particular mode has an engagement factor of 4.4. Looking more closely at increased engagement, the correlation between increased engagement and increased learning, students feel that the correlation coefficient for classroom delivery is 0.47. Students feel that e-course delivery is 0.79. Highly correlated. And then once again, virtual world delivery has a correlation coefficient of 0.87. In terms of other virtual learning simulation best practices, as I mentioned before, all of my simulations are optional. Also, when I first started providing virtual world learning simulations, I used real-time activities, discussions. And I would hear a resounding groan from students about the need for asynchronous activities. But the catch-22 here is that I always provide asynchronous activities. And then the next thing I hear from students is that what they really want is real-time activities. So once they master asynchronous activities, real-time activities are their next request. As I mentioned before, I pre-create, pre-position, and pre-stock student avatars in my private grid. I use dry runs prior to any voice-enabled discussions. Students like, and now I've become accustomed to only providing 3D handouts, walk-through textbooks, pullouts from the standpoint of machinima, images, and more. And I use student feedback to gauge the effectiveness of all of my simulations. Another best practice is for instructors to know the limits of their virtual grid in terms of real-time discussion is being staged. And then finally, I have always been a do-it-yourselfer and find starting small and working up to more elaborate simulations is a winning strategy. Looking next at a returning, I should say, to the take part challenge, I've already given the back story about what motivated me to offer this up as an option. And I still, again, I believe that offering up opportunities for more audience participation, more collaboration, not only yields interactivity among educators, in this case, but also expanded content for all of us. And again, maybe next year. Also, in closing, I wanted to remind everyone about the Learning Lab practice session tomorrow at 9 AM Pacific Time. And again, this will be a chance to practice setting up and using the Prisoner's Deloma Simulation. And finally, I'm going to open it up for questions now. And if you have any questions, add them to the chat, please. The first question from Stephen is, what age ranges are your students? And have I seen a difference between ages in the favorability of responses? And I'm assuming virtual world responses. My students are non-traditional age students, average age of 28 years. But I do have also traditional age college students in my courses. I find that older students are more favorably disposed to virtual world learning activities. This is one of those things that surprised me. I would think that our more digital natives are the ones that would like this type of thing. But my experience has been that traditional age students want to hang out with their friends, meet new friends, males, females, and find limited use for virtual settings. But the older students are working, have families, and I really appreciate the option of getting together with friends and colleagues and fellow students in a virtual world. Kevin asks, do you see a lot of social learning? I guess I do. But Kevin, I would have to say, it's not just limited to virtual learning. I see a lot of social learning in the text discussions in our learning management system. We use the Blackboard platform for all of our online courses. And I see students learning from each other, possibly in large part because their participation is graded, something that they have to do. But I see it both in the learning management system class, but also in our virtual activities too. Bill asks, technically, what challenges have you had in using virtual worlds for your lessons? Content, user interaction, user ramp up for the use of virtual worlds? Well, certainly all of the above, Bill. But one of the challenges for me, my biggest challenge, is more along the lines of motivating fellow faculty colleagues to look at this option to add to their online courses. Students that express an interest, for the most part, out of the 1 third to 1 half of my students that opt in for the virtual world learning activities, I would say 75% to 90% of those students are able to figure out the extensive instructions I provide them on how to download a viewer, how to log into the virtual world. It's only a few students that find out that they don't have a computer that's robust enough to run the viewer software. So it is easier for students to just be a passive participant than it is for instructors to have to learn enough about state management, content creation, even if they're using pre-created content, how to place that content. So that's one aspect of the challenges. But other what? But in terms of that, so that's kind of like the negative side of the technical aspects. On the positive side, I just, for myself, the years that I've spent working on this have been a real bonus because it seems to have motivated me to create all of my own lesson plans instead of relying on any of the textbook and siloing materials. And Steven adds, I've seen that too. The digital natives are more mixed in terms of engagement, but older students sometimes have tech hiccups. Yes, indeed. Greta asks, how do you define pre-positioned avatars? OK, well, first, the hosting service that I use, while I create all of my own content. Well, let me back up a second. I create some of my own content. I take full advantage of all of the splendid contact donations, like all of Neb's prizes that I've been collecting since yesterday around this grid. I set up all of my own simulations, whether I have created the actual objects or used some of the Creative Commons or open source objects that I've amassed. But I don't host my own grid. I have nine islands that is hosted by a hosting service, and it has a web interface. I give my students a choice of three female and three male avatars. I'm able to create those avatars via the web control panel access. And then I actually log in one time as each of those student avatars and move their avatar over right in front of the building or the island start location where they need to be and set their home position there. So pre-positioning means setting the home position right where those students need to be, and if they need any content, I add that into their avatars inventory. Kevin asks, do your students build in class? Most of the time, again, all of my students have asked for are very emphatic about they need asynchronous learning activities. So for the most part, everything is geared towards asynchronous learning activities. Still, once somebody gets proficient at asynchronously logging in and they realize that there's voice and text chat-enabled connectivity, they request real-time sessions. So sometimes those real-time sessions are discussing course-specific activities, but typically, like during the fall and spring semester, I'm teaching three classes at a time. So we find a time and a day when interested students from all three classes can log in. And I have one island out of the nine that has part of Linda Kelly's boardwalk. And I've set up my own shops. And there's a sandbox and a beach with waves. And I've set up beach houses and put a box of furniture outside of each beach cottage so students can, we can chat. They can learn about how to customize their avatar. They can claim one of the beach houses and spend the rest of the semester class time setting up the furniture in those classes. One of my big learning curve items for faculty using Virtual Worlds is the need to just be able to set up content and manipulate objects within this 3D environment. One question Annalisa asks is, can Italian students work with this project? And certainly, Annalisa, please take one of the or file copies from the web page or some of the materials that I've imported here into this grid. Take it back to your grid. All of the lesson plans and materials are in English, but I'm sure can be translated into Italian. As far as the grid that I have, for the moment, I just have it private for the standpoint of adhering to FERPA regulations. But what you're suggesting, maybe it would be fun to bring in some other students into the grid and do some collaboration. So we'll have to keep in touch about that. Let's see, I think I lost track of the questions here. Beth asks, how do these interactive bills help promote immersion? And does increased immersion result in increased learning? In terms of gauging how much increased immersion students believe they have found, I did ask those questions and calculate correlation coefficients. I first asked what students, whether they felt for the three delivery modes, classroom delivery, e-course delivery, and virtual world delivery, whether they felt like these learning modes were immersive. And all three modes had approximately equal correlation coefficients when I looked at interactivity and engagement. Classroom delivery actually had the highest correlation coefficient at 0.77 with e-course delivery at 0.71 and virtual world delivery at 0.72. So again, the only way that I have measured increased immersion, increased learning outcomes is to ask students their opinion about whether it's immersive or which mode is more immersive. But again, while students basically felt like all three delivery modes had the same amount of interactivity and interactivity correlated with engagement, when I looked at engagement correlated with increased learning outcomes, virtual world delivery was almost double what classroom delivery. Classroom delivery had a coefficient of 0.47, e-course delivery 0.79, and virtual world delivery 0.87. Let's see. Let me make sure that I haven't missed anything here. Would people like a build party on a public group sometimes? Steven asks. Absolutely. That's a great idea. Steven Zootfly is the head, not only of our research and education track in this conference, but also Vibe. And if anybody isn't familiar with the Vibe presentations, I'll let Steve jump in here in the chat to tell them where they can learn more about that. And that certainly sounds like something that would be great for the Vibe grid, or maybe even as we go forward, last year they left this entire OSCC grid up, I believe, throughout the year. So let me make sure. Steven has just added that to the chat. Any last questions? I'll let everyone have a nice long break here, and hope that maybe a few of the attendees today. Steven says they didn't leave it up the whole year, but switch out oars. OK, so I was wrong. Sounds good, Steven. Thank you, Kay, for a terrific presentation. As a reminder to our audience, you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org. Following this session at 11 AM, we have a break in the schedule for lunch or dinner wherever you may be in the physical world. We also encourage you to visit the Story Wheel exhibition in the Education 2 region to view a tool created in the 16th century called the Books Wheel, which can be thought of as a precursor of the modern website. In addition, if you're a crowd funder at the exclusive access level or above, you are invited to a VIP Q&A session with today's keynote speakers in the staff zone at 11 AM. Finally, we'll return after the lunch break in the keynote regions for an exciting keynote address from Philip Rosedale of High Fidelity, who will attempt to answer the question, what is the metaverse? Thank you again to our speaker and the audience. We'll be back after lunch. Have a great break. Thank you, Emile, and thanks for everyone that attended. I'll see you at the keynote.