 everyone and welcome to the 430 to 5 p.m. session of the 2020 open simulator community conference. In this session we are happy to introduce a presentation called staging effective graduate school residencies and open sim VR methodologies and insights. Our speaker today is Scott Dolphin. Scott is a graduate and high honors of the SUNY empire state college master of arts and learning with emerging technology program. He is an artist, a designer, virtual explorer and researcher in the uses of online virtual reality for education and the development of collaborative communities of practice. Please check out the website found at the conference dot open simulator dot org for speaker bios details of sessions and full schedule of events. The session is being live streamed and recorded. So if you have any questions or comments during the session, you may send tweets to at open sim cc with the hashtag oscc 20. Welcome everyone and let's begin the session. Hello everyone and welcome. As she pointed out, my name is Scott Dolphin. I am from SUNY empire state college in balmy new york state. And this is my presentation on staging effective graduate school residencies and open sim VR. So before I start just a quick little bit of background on SUNY empire state college. We are a decentralized university. We do have a main campus in saratoga springs, but we have unit offices all around the state. And we are the only campus with a full range of academic programs from an associates degree all the way through to a doctorate in leadership and education launching next fall. Most of our attendees are over the age of 25, working professionals, raising families, serving in the military and a majority of them are returning to college. So that means that the majority of our students have some mileage on them. They are not going to college just because their parents told them they need to. They're there with a vested interest. So every year the SUNY mallet program holds a residency. Now what are residencies? Residencies are environments that are designed to allow cohorts to evolve where people can learn from one another. They are rooted in academic theory from Piaget to Bygotsky and they're mandated in many professional environments, education, academics, and legal and business. However, presidencies as anyone knows who has staged a live event cost money. They take venues, avi equipment, catering, staffing, swag bags, and print media, lots and lots and lots of print media. Whereas VR, as we are all experiencing here and now, offers affordances that are unavailable at many onsite events. So attendees for these residencies, we started these residencies in virtual reality in 2018 and the first year we had 10 graduate students and they range through K-12 higher-edge and working professionals. We had four faculty members, six alumni, one out-of-state guest, Selby, and the Dean of Graduate Studies. The following year we had almost doubled the amount of attendees and increased some of our out-of-state guests and the year after that we were well over 45 attendees. We had grown considerably with our attendance. So this was something of a a benchmark of success that we are getting more and more attendees here in VR. Now, the SUNY mallet program, which is the master of arts in learning with the emerging technology, uses the Kitely grid. Now, I do not mean to seem this is a plug for Kitely. We use Kitely for a number of reasons. There are many great grids out there on the hyper grid, but Kitely provides us with a few things, not the least of which is it's very inexpensive. It's obviously, like most hyper grids, free to the students to download, but it's very inexpensive if you want to start to build in Kitely. The islands begin at around $15 a pop and Kitely offers dedicated server space. So when you're hosting large events, the last thing you want to do is have your large event on the same server as everybody else popping in and out of open sim on that grid because you're going to have some serious lag time. Kitely is also exceptionally good when it comes to responsive service, even with some of my stupid questions. They get back to me within about 24 hours. Now, we host our grid or we host our residencies on Marion Island. Marion Island is owned by Dr. Eileen O'Connor and she is the program director for the mallet program and is following me in the next presentation. And Marion Island is one of the larger grids. It's a 16 by 16 and will host up to 80 people. And as Dr. Eileen points out, she is a scientist. She's not a designer. So her island is kind of an agglomeration of OER resources that she's picked up over her 10 years in virtual reality that have kind of been gathered together to create these really interesting little vignettes. The island provides multiple zones for exploration and inspiration and here in the images, you can see on the right side, she's got a desert oasis here in the lower image. She's got this fabulous crusader castle and then up above this is her auditorium space here. Now, the biggest problem that we have discovered and I'm sure as anyone who has worked on OSCC here is onboarding. Getting people loaded into VR is sometimes problematic. The number one issue that we encounter unsurprisingly is microphone settings. So to deal with this, we encourage pre-residency visits. Many of the attendees are in classes in virtual reality in the mallet program already. So they've had a little bit of familiarity, but they're encouraged to come into Kitely and make sure they get themselves situated so they know how to operate. Many of the instructors will offer badges for students to come in and just demonstrate VR proficiency and like anything in life, practice makes perfect. Now, in as a way, we are an asynchronous teaching model. So we have to offer a number of different onboarding resources to get people into VR. And mind you, these are all VR newbies. They don't have quite the same experience that many of us here do. So we offer multiple channels of information for them. First and foremost is Dr. Eileen's website. Now, this is 10 years of knowledge that she has polished and fine-tuned and covers pretty much every situation that you're going to encounter in OpenSim. There's a reference for it here on the website. She also offers classroom events, as I've mentioned before. Many of the students have had at least one or two events in Kitely before they get to the residency. They're in-world media scattered throughout Marion Island. There are tutorial billboards and links to outside sources. If you're running to trouble, there are ways to find help there. Links to the YouTube tutorials, of course, there are a proliferation of those. And we have offered one-to-one tech support. We ask people to show up a little bit early. If they need some help, we can give them some. Now, the second issue that most people report in VR is navigation. Now, Eileen has designed her island to make it as simple as possible to navigate. The first thing she does is generally teach people how to use simple map teleportation. And to enhance on that, as you'll see in the bottom image here, all these floating numbers and pictograms above her island, these will show up in the map. So there are landmarks that give people wayfinding paths to find different resources on the island. Now, the agenda for most of these residencies is generally along the same lines. The goal here is to form a cohort with your fellow students and provide a view of some of the technology they have to choose from when they enter the program. So they're given an overview of emerging tech in entertainment, corporate America, and education, and a survey of how it's applied use. One of the favorite segments is an exploration, the intersections of art, science, and immersive learning demonstrated at Meow Wolf. And for those of you who are not familiar with Meow Wolf, I encourage you to go Google it and just look at some of the videos that are posted out there. It's a truly phenomenal experience. They're also given a review of virtual reality applications, immersive gaming environments and theory, augmented reality media, mapping 360 cameras. We throw a lot of tech at them in this event. And they're given an introduction to the online collaborative graduate school community and available tech therein. That was a program I worked on over the summer. It was a collaborative community of practice website for the graduate students and alumni to meet together and just share ideas in an open forum. And over the years at the end of each one of these events, we've always given them a quiz what worked, what didn't work, and asked for feedback. And inevitably we got the same response. They wanted more interactive activities. They had a brief taste of it just getting in and sitting down, but they wanted to see more. So for 2020, we provided them with some other activities. And three of us who are members of the Institute for New Paradigms, this is a group that Dr. O'Connor runs that kind of spitballs ideas of how to spread the gospel of web-based VR to the greater world, created these three interactive installations on the upper right corner of her island. And you'll see that we mark them here with big A, B, and C signs to be seen on the map. And for those who preferred to navigate by flying or walking, I also created these rotating giant arrows with our names and pictures on the side of them so you could see them from one side of the island to the other. And the three of us, it was myself, Bethany Winslow, who's up later tonight, and Cydarm Madonna, who I believe is somewhere in the audience, I saw him, created these individual installations and we round-robin the students through them and just kind of through some interesting things at them to play with. Now, mine was an exploration of how VR can be used as a transmissive media. That's kind of what gets me going. How can we transmit information in world? And there's multiple ways to do this. You can link media to YouTube, and I use Google Arts and Culture a lot on Prims. I gave them a bunch of simple scripted state change Prims, things that would change color and location, size, shape, texture. These were all generated using the Conwiley script generator. And if any of you are not familiar with that, I would recommend you go find that it's a great way to introduce students to scripting and how to script out state changes on a prim. And it's a lot of fun to play with. Bethany gave them an overview of other VR platforms outside of just the Hypergrid. She demonstrated quite a few of them, Mozilla Hubs and the like. And she also had this really great interactive toy to play with, the opinionator, where you could pose questions to the group and the avatars could then march to the individual zones that represented their opinion of the question, and then it produced a pie chart in the center. So it was a quick visualization or a polling tool that was, oh, yes, it's there. Bethany used it and it's a lot of fun, the opinionator. And then Sidearm created this really interesting exhibit using Bundler to demonstrate the use of QR codes and augmented reality experiences using your smartphone. So he was incorporating multimedia tech into the VR environment. You'd scan, you'd load Bundler onto your phone, you could scan a QR code, and it would pop up with this truly amazing augmented reality information. So the students were bounced from one activity to the next, and then we sent them back to the rest of the presentations. Now the post event discussions on this were very enlightening. There was a lot of discussion about the uses of AR and VR into their classrooms and professional lives. A lot of them recognized the benefits of VR, being able to move out into separate breakout groups. At one point during the event, Dr. Eileen had sent them out to some of her different little vignettes that she had and just encouraged them to brainstorm how you might use a setting like that for an academic purpose. A lot of them recognized the high level of detail achieved in VR. We had a number of designers in the class who were very interested in exploring Blender and SketchUp as how to produce. There was a highly positive feedback overall. It was pretty much universal for the immersive nature of the event. Everybody really, really appreciated the fact that you were immersed in this environment and they bought into it. We had attendees from Buffalo to Long Island, from New Jersey, Texas, California, and we even had people coming in from Europe. A couple of attendees were home sick and were still able to participate safely, and that was a big plus. Nobody had any FOMO. It was comfortable and convenient. This was very often commented on. Nobody had to travel in horrible weather like we're having up here tonight. And social connections were made between the attendees and they were carried over after the event. So cohorts were formed and that was the principal goal behind having this event. I'm a little behind on my slides here. Please forgive me. So the interactive ABC exhibitions were the most consistently well received. So this really spoke to the idea that it is important to provide something to do beyond just sitting and listening. That was a comment we got the first year we hosted the events just like any other conference you just find a seat and you listen all day long. So they really appreciated the ability to get out to do things, to touch things, and to experience what VR can do. The second most commented on discussions were about male wolf and the intersections of exploratory interactivity, art, and education, and discussions about the use of game-based technology for education. These really got a lot of people's attention. So the insights that we got from this, it's important that you have to send out repeated advanced preparatory directions for signing up and downloading the appropriate VR. As I mentioned, most of our students are working adults. They're busy. If they don't take the time to properly download the viewer, they're going to have trouble in the day of. We required them to test their internet connections and computer speed and avatar controls well in advance of the VR event. We pre-scheduled help desk support and phone assistance in advance of the conference. I'll be honest with you, the most time I spent was with faculty, more so than the students. We asked the new users to arrive early and we allowed, and this is important, we allowed time for exploration and breaks for interactive activities and just socializing and discussion. Then the elephant in the room that I have to point out is that not everyone is going to be suited to virtual reality. No matter how hard we try and how hard we encourage people, inevitably someone is going to have trouble and they're casting about for help in the middle of a discussion. Unfortunately, that's one thing we did not have at the time as someone who could then take someone off the side and maybe work with them. Most of the students of the faculty were already engaged with the production. The conclusions and next steps, immersivity, interactivity, and connectivity really are the keys to success in staging a successful residency. A VR environment can provide the opportunities for connections to be established between colleagues and between ideas and planning for in-person events requires considerably more time and expense than creating a good VR onboarding tutorial website and designating somebody to be an onboarding support technician. And in conclusion, the SUNY Empire State College Mallet Program and the Institute for New Paradigms will be continuing to extend and expand their work as more and more institutions and organizations recognize the potential of web-based VR. So thank you all very much for coming. Thank you Scott for a terrific panel session. I did see some quick questions coming up in the audience trying to around how your students dealt with the pandemic. Could you speak a little bit about that? You know, I have to say I think it worked to our benefit this go-around if only because so many people had been conditioned to video conferencing over the last six months that we didn't have quite as many microphone or sound issues as we have in the past. So that was kind of a silver lining to the situation. Everybody had I think a certain degree of online tech savvy that maybe they hadn't demonstrated as a whole in the past. So that was a good thing. As far as the rest of it go, they seem to enjoy it more obviously more than Skype. That was the one comment that we did see. It was less invasive than being on a Skype call, a video call. Exactly. We hear so much about people being zoomed out so this is a perfect opportunity to get involved. But with that note, well thank you so much Scott again and as a reminder to the rest of the audience, you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org and following the session, the next session will begin at 5 p.m. in this keynote region and it is entitled SOS, Extended Environment Supports for Expansion and Educators Plea. Also we encourage you to visit the OSCC 20 poster expo in the OSCC Expo three region to find accompanying information on the presentation and explore the hyper grid tour sessions and open simulator. Thank you everyone. Have a good day. Thank you.