A Technical Update on Second Life's Readiness for E-Learning

More than two years ago, when I first encountered the "virtual world" known as Second Life, education blogs and forums were filled with speculation about its use and promise for commercial real-world e-Learning. And the speculation is still going on. At this writing, a Google search for all Web sites containing the phrase "Second Life" plus "e-Learning" or "education" or "training" drew almost 3.7 million hits. And two years ago, Second Life wasn't ready to be either a communications channel or a delivery venue for commercial courses and training. But that situation has begun to change. In fact, I now teach "virtual architecture and construction" in Second Life. And this puts me in a good position to comment about its potential as a future channel and venue for education...from the perspective of a technical insider.

• Courses are purchased through an e-Commerce portal or accessed for free through a web-based catalog.
• Training content is delivered online to user PCs over Web connections.
• Student learning is measured and tested.
• Training records are tracked, managed, stored, and archived by some kind of Learning Management System (LMS) or Learning Content Management System (LCMS).

A Growing User Base

Two years ago, 6 million users had SL accounts, and you could expect to find around 30,000 to 40,000 of their avatars "in-world" at any one time. Today, more than 16 million users have accounts, of which 65,000 to 90,000 are usually scattered around its virtual land at any time. So its use has more than doubled in two years.

The ages of these users break down roughly as follows (as of March 2008, based on statistics available within Second Life from its owner, Linden Labs):

• 13-17.........1.01 %
• 18-24.......23.32
• 25-34.......35.29
• 35-44.......23.81
• 45+...........16.06
• Unknown...0.51

It seems, then, that today's under-30 "net generation" (along with the generations that follow) will be active "Metaverse" users (at least, percentage-wise). And if your own training audiences include 18-30 year-olds, then Second Life may be a tool to watch, for grabbing and holding this group's attention.

Virtual e-Learning Today

Two years ago, most Second Life training was delivered through a "classroom" model. Teachers and students met on virtual turf, and teachers presented information and led students through hands-on virtual exercises. Usually, this training was about how to use Second Life itself...and not about real-world subjects. This remains largely the case today.

True, many colleges and universities have built entire virtual campuses in Second Life. But in most cases, the real bang they seek for their SL bucks is to expose their own "net generation" students to the Metaverse, and to familiarize them with virtual 3D-design tools.

There are exceptions though. For example, at a virtual hospital on Imperial College London's Second Life campus, medical students visit virtual respiratory patients under the guidance of a virtual doctor, access recordings of real-life patients' breathing, order X-rays from a virtual radiology department, consult with virtual peers, and recommend diagnoses. The college is planning to partner with other universities, so that nursing students from Australia, for example, could collaboratively work (and learn) beside physical therapists from Japan and medical students from the U.S.

But outside of such innovative projects, much of the training in Second Life is still delivered using bit-mapped images, plain-text "Notecards," text messages, graphic displays, and streaming video tutorials (many of which you can watch by searching YouTube for "Second Life"). And most of this training isn't actively tracked, managed, and archived.

So Second Life isn't yet functioning as the kind of commercial training venue that e-Learning vendors and practitioners would recognize. This could soon change.

Important Technical Developments

In 2008, Linden Labs began two technical improvements that could equip Second Life to be a serious tool for creating and delivering training on a commercial scale.

Development 1: In Second Life, a C++like coding language (the Linden Scripting Language, or "LSL") is used to make virtual objects perform actions or respond to events. (Without LSL scripts, very little would "occur" in SL.) The first important development in 2008 was a new LSL command (llDetectedTouchPos) that allows Second Life's servers to detect the exact location where an avatar touches a virtual object. So beginning in 2008, users could define areas on virtual objects and trigger different actions, depending on where the objects are touched.

If you're part of the commercial e-Learning community, this may sound familiar. It's nothing less than a virtual 3D implementation of the 2D "Image Maps" and "Active Images" that are so common, useful, and necessary for creating today's interactive online training materials. (For those who don't know, a 2D image is turned into an "Active Image" by placing an "Image Map" of clickable "Hot Spots" over it. When any of these spots are clicked, a new exhibit appears, window opens, or action takes place. This fundamental technology is critical to most existing online training.)

How might this capability foster next-generation, immersive, 3D training in Second Life? Let's say that a large medical school has built a giant, virtual, beating heart (complete with circulating blood) for its Second Life-based anatomy courses. (This has been done, by the way.) Lessons about cardiac anatomy could then be delivered as either:

• Instructor-Led, where the instructor leads students on a swim through the virtual heart, to view and discuss its important working features up close (also done).
• Self-Paced, where students swim around unescorted, and receive informational screen displays as they approach or touch parts of the beating heart's anatomy.

When ready, each student could then touch a "Test Giver" object (perhaps a virtual replica of the instructor!). The LSL script in this object would display a randomized series of questions on the student's PC screen, and enforce a time period for answering each one. Questions like:

1. "Please go back into the heart and within the next minute, find and touch the valve where oxygenated blood from the lungs enters the heart."
2. "Within the next minute, find and touch the valve where deoxygenated blood leaves the heart for the lungs."
3. "Find and touch the eddy in the blood flow that reveals Mitral Regurgitation. CAUTION: You'll see many eddies in the heart, and some are hard to differentiate!"
4. "Swim into the Aortic Arch, and touch the spot on its wall that reveals the beginning of an aneurysm. NOTE: More than one part of the anatomy has "Aorta" in its name.

As the above example hints, this sort of virtual 3D testing could even demand a more real understanding of its subject than today's written and online tests! Using the llDetectedTouchPos command, the LSL script in the Test Giver could detect where students touch the virtual heart to answer each question; determine whether their answers are right or wrong; give visible, audible, or displayed feedback; compute final test scores; and transmit test results to an administrative avatar's ID (both in-world and through external emails).

Again, my colleagues in the commercial e-Learning world may recognize, in this example, a virtual 3D version of a traditional LMS or LCMS. And the above scenario, while only partially doable before the llDetectedTouchPos scripting command appeared, became fully realizable then. As a result, schools and other educational organizations that create or deliver training over the Web should watch this technology and how it's going to be used.

Development 2: The second important technical development occurred when Linden Labs added the ability to display real-world Web pages on virtual objects, including Metaverse computer screens, TVs, and yes, even advertising blimps. But alas, a big chunk of this capability remains missing. At this writing, these web displays are static-people can't use their links, scroll bars, or other interactive controls within Second Life.

This missing Web-interactivity piece is expected to arrive in 2009 or 2010. And when it does, all of the following will become technically feasible (even if cost-effectiveness may still be in the future):

• Schools and other e-Learning providers could offer and/or sell "Online, Self-Paced" training (including existing courses streamed into Second Life from real-world servers) through either Second Life's or the content supplier's e-Commerce system-for viewing on a virtual campus by students and customers from around the world.
• Commercial e-Learning providers could stream software demonstrations and new-customer training into Second Life from existing company servers-for viewing by clients around the world, whose avatars assemble at a secure virtual customer-support site.
• Commercial e-Learning providers could troubleshoot e-Learning system issues at a secure, virtual support site-with both customer and supplier representatives viewing live software screens streamed in from both customer and supplier servers.

Roadblocks Still Exist

But even if all the above capabilities were fully available today, several technical and financial roadblocks might still hinder Second Life's use as a commercial training platform:

• There's a pretty steep learning curve for doing anything in Second Life. And while it's free to use, it costs real-world bucks to build and maintain a virtual presence there.
• Second Life uses a proprietary viewer program, not a standard browser. And the application's network bandwidth has led some Internet Service Providers to "cap" their customers' usage. In a commercial e-Learning application, this could become as problematic an issue as quirky teleconferencing connections are for us today.
• Web-based learning materials depend heavily on text, image, sound, and video files. And under Linden Labs' current fee structure, only text can be brought into Second Life for free. Everything else costs 10 "Linden Dollars" (about 3 cents U.S.) per file to import. That doesn't sound like much, but it means that every change to any image or sound file in a virtual course would (currently) cost its designers 3 real pennies. (Of course, streaming finalized courses onto Second Life screens from real-world servers would avoid much of this cost.)
• Virtual multimedia is currently constrained by Linden Labs. Today, only one "media stream" can play at a time on each parcel of virtual land. This restriction would need to be lifted before commercial levels of e-Learning could take place there.

But What About Content Creation?

A reverse question is whether Second Life might be a useful venue for creating training content to be delivered in the real world? And the answer is a resounding Yes. Virtual films (called Machinima) are being made in Second Life faster and less expensively than would be possible in the real world (if they were even filmable in the real world at all).

Search YouTube for "Second Life" and you'll find almost 38,000 videos. Most are "tours" of Second Life locations or tutorials about using Second Life itself. But interesting educational videos are also appearing:

• UC Davis posted one about their virtual research into mass prophylaxis, and their virtual reproduction of schizophrenic hallucinations (to help doctors better understand schizophrenia).
• Another video describes LanguageLab, a virtual school that teaches English as a Second Language (ESL), and EnglishCity, a virtual town where students from all countries can practice their English in immersive, day-to-day, virtual settings.
• Several Georgia Institute of Technology videos show off their research in "Augmented Reality"...the live mixing of real and virtual images on real-world computer screens. This topic is of interest to engineers, architects, industrial designers, and any other professionals who need to show clients how finished projects will look and work in their future real-world settings. But e-Learning developers should follow these developments too...especially if their training topics might be taught and tested even better by overlaying training feedback and test results over live real-world video feeds. In industrial settings, for example, this technology could train and test factory-floor employees who are asked to demonstrate their ability to control a live process...such as a materials-mixing machine or a factory-floor robot that's devoted to employee training.

You can find many of these educational YouTube videos through this link: www.youtube.com/results

The bottom line here is that Second Life (the largest of several virtual worlds that now constitute the "Metaverse") is being used for education, and educational materials are being created there. And soon, the technical pieces will be in place to at least enable e-Learning and Learning-Management-System functions at virtual venues.

Will you as a school, training supplier, or e-Learning practitioner want to go there? That will depend on your pocketbook and your patience for the Metaverse's fairly steep learning and implementation curves. But more than those, it will depend on your training audiences. If they:

• Include highly "networked" 18-30 year-olds,
• Require training about subjects that are inherently 3D, or that could be taught and tested better in 3D than through today's traditional 2D methods,
• Have become so global that you're having difficulty serving their online meeting, training, and support needs,

...then you should at least watch Second Life, as a potential future medium and venue for grabbing and holding your audiences' attention, in their increasingly online world.

NOTE: This article will only briefly mention the kinds of campuses and educational approaches currently used in Second Life. Many web pages in the above search will tell you more about that. Instead, this article describes important technical changes within Second Life that begin to equip it to handle "commercial e-Learning" (electronic learning). In the real world, this online education takes many forms, but they have common characteristics: