Please join us for an informative OWL Showcase on Wednesday. We will be visiting Springfield Technical Community College’s (STCC) virtual campus currently being used to teach English as a Second Language (ESL).
WonderBuilders has worked with the STCC faculty to create an extensive learning environment for ESL students.
Selection of STCC virtual campus spaces
In this US National Science Foundation sponsored project, two ESL classrooms are completing their first semester-long deployment of Open Wonderland. During the tour, attendees will have the opportunity to try out some of the in-world activities designed for students including recording audio conversations, going on an activity scavenger hunt, participating in a photo hunt, and creating a custom fair booth.
Registration is required for this event. Since this not a public world, the URL for the server will not be made public. The login information will only be sent to people who register using the Eventbrite link above.
If you plan on attending and have a smart phone, please consider taking some photos using Instagram so you can more fully participate in the “photo hunt” activity. You can see a preview of this activity in the ESL Department’s recently published Photo Hunt album on Facebook as well as a preview of the Multi-Cultural Fair Booth Activity.
If you are not able to make the tour on Wednesday, there is a possibility of another tour on Sunday, December 16th at 2pm US Eastern time. If enough people express interest, we will set up a second tour on that date. To express interest, please leave a comment on this blog article or post a message on the Open Wonderland forum.
The research project summarized in this article was conducted as part of the requirements for degree of MSc Computer Science at Nottingham Trent University in the UK. For this project, I created an Open Wonderland Chatbot Module.
A chatbot is a virtual character that simulates an intelligent conversation with humans. The main purpose of this project was to extend Open Wonderland’s non-player character (NPC) functionality to interact with human avatars. The chatbot is embedded in a virtual campus simulated learning environment (see screenshots of the virtual campus). The main purpose of the chatbot is to communicate or guide users to solve their problems.
Virtual campus in which chatbot is integrated.
Here is an example of an integrated chatbot window in which a user has engaged in a conversation with the chatbot from inside Open Wonderland.
Chatbot window
While chatbots can be used to simulate conversations that convince people the bot is a real person, they can also be used as an advanced search engine to retrieve factual knowledge for users.
Technical Details
Initially, my intention was to develop a basic conversational agent program which could perform keyword-matching to scan for user inputs and generate replies. In the final project, however, I instead integrated a highly developed existing artificial intelligence engine. This engine is based on ALICE (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) which uses an AIML-based (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) interpreter to query and retrieve information. To integrate this technology into Open Wonderland, I experimented with both a Java-based AIML interpreter known as Program-D and a web-based AIML interpreter called Pandorabots. I ended up using Pandorabots for the Chatbot module prototype.
Pandorabots uses the XML-RPC (remote procedure call) communication protocol. It uses XML to encode data, and it works by sending an HTTP request to the server. A client can interact with Pandorabots using a Bot ID. The main advantage of using Pandorabots is that it is easy for users to create and add knowledge to their chatbots by uploading AIML files.
The diagram below illustrates where the Chatbot module fits into the structure of the Virtual Campus once it is complete.
Virtual Campus system diagram.
As envisioned, the Virtual Campus will include seven buildings covering many disciplines including business, arts, technology, team collaboration, socializing room, student club, and student service. Students will be able to get virtual resources from various specialized virtual departments and directly obtain relevant information easily. The Virtual Campus will also include non-academic rooms for entertainment.
The chatbot functionality will be used throughout the Virtual Campus as an automated guide or instructor, able to interact with students to solve their problems. The AIML integration will allow us to interface with a variety of additional knowledge bases, such as WolframAlpha and DBpedia, allowing students to retrieve information from the chatbot without leaving the virtual world environment.
A big advantage of using Open Wonderland is that it is a great multi-user virtual environment engine that provides many functionalities and in-world applications that students and lecturers can utilize in the Virtual Campus. A well organized virtual campus can be the most efficient way for students and lecturers to collaborate. To support this collaboration, we are planning to use the PDF viewer, an in-world web browser, the Microsoft Office document viewer, text-chat, VOIP audio, webcam video integration, the Screen Sharer and VNC Viewer for desktop sharing, NetBeans for programming projects, in-world music players, wall posters, and the multi-user white board for discussions and sketching. These tools, embedded in the virtual world, are similar to desktop-based applications.
This guest post is a summary version of a longer report.
Student Pilot Trial of learning statistics using SPSS embedded within Open Wonderland at King’s College London Institute of Psychiatry
Dr. Jenny Yiend, Mental Heath Studies Progamme Director. Dr. Yiend graduated from Cambridge University where she went on to gain a PhD in anxiety and attentional processing. She held a full time research post at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, where she carried out further work on cognition in emotional disorders. At the University of Oxford she was Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Psychiatry, Honorary Lecturer in the Department of Experimental Psychology and Director of Studies for Psychology at St Hilda’s College. Dr. Yiend joined the King’s College London Institute of Psychiatry in 2009 where she continues working on cognition and emotion in psychological disorders. Her email address is jenny.yiend@kcl.ac.uk
Julian Fletcher, Ed. Development Manager& MHSP Team[1]. Julian Fletcher has Master degrees in Electronic Engineering from the University of Nottingham and in Education,Technology and Society from the University of Bristol and is a Chartered Engineer and Prince 2 Project Management Practitioner. He spent the first 10 years of his career working as a software engineer and web designer in several UK private sector organisations and following that and further study he worked as the e-Leaning Manager for the University for the Creative Arts and since 2008 the King’s College London Institute of Psychiatry where he works currently. Julian was first shown Project Wonderland in late 2008 and has been working with it ever since. His email address is julian.fletcher@kcl.ac.uk
Overview
The Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) Mental Health Studies Programme (MHSP) is the first in King’s College London to trial the use of a distributed application, embedded within a virtual 3D environment, for teaching and learning purposes. The pilot trial was conducted on 15th August 2011 in an Open Wonderland (OWL) virtual environment. The content was designed by the IoP Education Development Manager (Fletcher) and hosted on the IoP’s Denmark Hill Campus LAN. The tutor and three students presented themselves as avatars and used the embedded SPSS statistics application together with the environment’s built-in audio facilities to interactively collaborate and complete a structured statistical teaching and learning exercise.
Feasibility Pilot
Currently the IoP Mental Health Studies Programme teaches research methods to its 110 students via 90 minute lectures or practical workshops held once a week. There is some divergence between the theory that students learn in the classroom setting and the case examples they practise upon and their ability to apply this knowledge to the real data that they gather as part of their research projects. Since 2009, MHSP has contemplated the use of the OWL 3D virtual environment to target this need specifically by providing a new fortnightly problem-based learning session in which students participate interactively and collaboratively.
The trial consisted of an introduction to the task by the tutor, a structured SPSS tasking lasting about 40 minutes during which the tutor and 3 students carried out simple SPSS exercises, followed by a more open-ended period of exploration of the world by the students.
Fig 1 Aerial view of pilot MHSP environment when imported into OWL.
Each of the three Breakout Rooms consisted of a VNC Viewer screen for displaying a distributed application, a screen for displaying a video and either a poster in the case of Breakout Room 1 or a PDF Viewer in the cases of Breakout Rooms 2 & 3 for displaying documents. In the Breakout Room 1, used in this trial, the SPSS statistics application was displayed in the VNC Viewer (Fig 2) which the tutor and students could interact with through their clients (Fig 3). There was also a video player screen which displayed a video produced by the University of Minnesota Department of Sociology on how to use SPSS. An in-world poster was used to display the instructions for the statistical tasks to be carried out in the trial.
Fig 2. SPSS Application displayed in VNC Viewer in Breakout Room 1, with VNC controls.
Fig 3. An example client screen used to interact with SPSS in the virtual world.
The OWL firewall ports between the Education Development Manager‘s workstation and the three client workstations were opened for the duration of the trial to enable communication of sound and visual data. Notwithstanding the occasional logout of one or more client browsers, the server performance was fairly robust with good sound clarity for both speaking and listening. Both the tutor and the 3 students used headsets with built-in microphones procured from Argos for £7.99 each. These inexpensive headsets did the job satisfactorily. This £31.96 was the only fixed expense incurred by the trial other than the beverages bought for the participating students by way of a small thank you for their contribution to it. This short video clip shows the pilot setup:
The degree of prior familiarity with game technologies seems to dictate how quickly students can familiarise themselves with and navigate around the OWL environment. One student had such existing experience being an enthusiastic games player whereas the other two had to rely on more explicit tutorial guidance to get started. All three students, however, succeeded in becoming familiar and comfortable using OWL and none dismissed it out of hand as something they simply could not use.
All three students have willingly adopted the collaborative style of learning that applications embedded into OWL are designed to foster. Their responses indicate that there is an optimum size group of students around a single application to make such collaboration work (no greater than 4 when one includes the tutor). The need to take control of the application in turns in order to interact with it, while making that interaction slow at times, has the benefit of ensuring all students can keep up with the task and have a chance to practically apply their knowledge through completing the task.
All three students shared the opinion that working in groups collaboratively and learning more about statistics through communicating with each other was what they liked best about the exercise. The ability to talk to teach other using OWL’s audio facility and the need to take it in turns to complete the task encouraged such collaboration.
Overall the pilot feedback suggested:
An optimum group size for this application is about 4 students working together.
Retaining concentration could be improved by enhancing visual and interactive content of the environment. This highlights the need to have architectural designers with proficient 3D design skills to build such content and programmers with proficient scripting skills to make it interactive.
More sophisticated, ‘human like’ and individually distinct avatars to make online conversations more natural. The College-issued PCs did not support the 3D graphics necessary to render OWL’s customizable avatars.
Delays of respective clients to render the world can significantly impair its use. This needs to be ameliorated by using a more dedicated and higher performance specification OWL client/server hosting solution.
Using a virtual environment such as OWL can help students to further engage with and be more motivated to learn and apply statistics, supplementing and consolidating what they learn in their current classroom sessions by making such learning a more ‘hands-on’ activity.
Even taking account of the limitations of this pilot exercise – e.g. a small group of participating students, and computer and network hardware not designed for anything as memory intensive as immersive virtual worlds – this pilot trial can be judged at the very least a qualified success. For the most part, the technology worked for the duration of the trial (far better than the Education Development Manager dared hope!) and none of the students dismissed using virtual worlds as part of their teaching and learning as a completely bad idea! In fact they were on balance positive about its potential.
Scope for further work
Taking the current pilot to the next stage will require a more powerful Open Wonderland hosted service as well as more appropriate client hardware. This is currently being investigated at the College level.
Some further thought on the design of both SPSS tasks themselves from a pedagogical perspective and the content within the OWL environment will also need to take place. In particular, the personalisation of avatars will take on increased importance when more students will be in-world concurrently than was the case with this small trial.
Finally, it should not be the goal of virtual worlds to replace what the MHSP currently does perfectly well using more ‘traditional’ methods such as class-based lectures and training courses. Rather, the purpose is to augment such activities through giving students increased scope to apply the statistical theory they are taught in class and in textbooks to practical data sets related to their own course of research.
It was especially pleasing to note how students were happy to help each other and learn from each other in the collaborative in-world SPSS task. This is likely to help to inculcate wider transferable skills such as team working and proactive problem solving.
[1] Sophie Ciaramella, Kalbir Sohi, Matthew Isard, Emily Leathers-Smith and Helen Aivazian
At that Immersive Education conference in Boston last month, eight Open Wonderland community members from 6 different countries joined me remotely to show off their work. Here’s a brief summary of the worlds and features presented during the showcase. In all cases, the presenters have agreed to leave their spaces running on the community server. If you missed the conference, you can explore the spaces on your own. Simply log on to the community server and use the Placemarks menu to navigate to the different spaces.
WonderBuilders Outpatient Clinic
I began the session by showing one of the simulated medical spaces created by my company WonderBuilders.
WonderBuilders Outpatient Clinic
This virtual outpatient clinic is designed for communications skills training. Each of our virtual clinical spaces comes with a soundproof observation room with one-way windows so that instructors and others can observe students during role-playing scenarios. This space also features a non-player character that speaks, a poster with links to different portions of the space, an App Frame for organizing documents, and pop-up questions using a modified version of the Sheet Suite developed jointly by WonderBuilders and the University of Missouri.
+Spaces
Michael Gardner from the University of Essex talked about the +Spaces (pronounced “positive spaces”) EU-funded project aimed at engaging citizens in policy-making. Michael showed excerpts from this role-play video:
Johanna Pirker from Graz University in Austria took us on a tour of the space she created for teaching entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneur Space from Graz University
This space includes an informal area for students to get to know one another, an area for presentations, and a work area where students, mentors, and instructors can collaborate.
WonderSchool
Roland Sassen demonstrated WonderSchool, an on-line school that takes advantage of Wonderland’s ability to run shared applications within the virtual world.
WonderSchool with the Alice programming environment.
Roland demonstrated how he can teach students to use complex software such as the Alice programming environment from within the virtual world. He also demonstrated other dynamic applications running remotely inside a VNC Viewer window.
Seekers School Maze
Chris Derr, head of the Seekers School, talked about using Wonderland in his innovative curriculum to motivate kids who have had difficulty in other school situations.
Seeker School student activities
The students spent the past semester learning how to build Open Wonderland worlds, including making their own 3D models in SketchUp and creating simple animations using Wonderland’s EZScript capability. Among other things, the students created a fun maze, mountain climbing challenges, and a colorful spinning roof.
iSocial
Ryan Babiuch from the University of Missouri iSocial project showed one of the many learning spaces used as part of their curriculum for remotely teaching social competency skills to students with autism spectrum disorders.
iSocial space used in teaching students with autism.
This curriculum was pilot tested this past semester in two schools. While the data has not yet been fully analyzed, the initial results were extremely positive.
ImmerHire
Michel Denis and Gery Winkler from ImmerHire showed the Survival on the Moon space they use to help assess logical thinking skills.
ImmerHire – Assessing logical thinking in the Survival on the Moon scenario.
The ImmerHire environment is intended to help employers evaluate communication, personal, and social skills of job applicants using a range of virtual role-play activities.
STCC Virtual Campus
Kristy Perry, an English-as-a-second-language (ESL) professor at Springfield Technical Community College, showed one of the spaces she designed on the STCC Virtual Campus.
STCC Virtual Campus – patio
This patio space is intended as a venue for small group projects and conversation practice. The STCC Virtual Campus will be deployed for Level 2 ESL students starting in September.
Wonderland Wednesday Projects
Jonathan Kaplan, our Wonderland architect, demonstrated the three Wonderland Wednesday community projects that he has lead. These projects – Telepointers, EZMove, and Subsnapshot Import/Export – were all developed collaboratively on the Open Wonderland community server. In the weekly Wonderland Wednesday meetings, developers worked together using NetBeans and other shared applications.
Telepointer demonstration
The new Telepointers are considerably more aesthetically appealing than the old telepointers. More importantly, they now work when you have control of a 2D application. For multi-user applications such as the Whiteboard, this is particularly helpful as it allows users to see where everyone else is working.
Be sure to visit the community server to see these spaces and try out the set of Wonderland Wednesday features.
Mary Beth Ogulewicz is a lawyer as well as an ESL and Criminal Justice professor at Springfield Technical Community College (STCC). She seeks to empower her students by helping them become fluent in English and preparing them for a career in law enforcement and related fields. She is also interested in the connection between health, wellness, the strengths movement and successful living.
Springfield Technical Community College and WonderBuilders have embarked on creating a 3D virtual college campus pursuant to a 3 year National Science Foundation grant. WonderBuilders is working with the English as a Second Language (ESL) Department to enhance opportunities for students to practice conversation. The virtual college campus will allow students who have limited opportunity to interact with native speakers and partake in campus activities to meet in-world with conversation buddies as well fellow students. Among the goals are increased conversational competence, higher levels of engagement with the college, and increased matriculation rates. Curriculum activities for each level of English are being planned. Additionally, to assist students, various campus offices such as Financial Aid, Registrar and the Health Office will hold office hours in-world. Below are some of the activities we have created thus far.
Simon Says
ESL students gain technological proficiency by engaging in a game of Simon Says. This fun introductory activity builds confidence for students who may have lower technology skills. It also embeds vocabulary and prepositions for Level 2 language students.
Conversation Buddies
Due to family and work obligations, ESL students often have limited time to engage in authentic conversation with native speakers. With many students working 2nd and 3rd shift, the virtual world provides an optimal platform for students to meet native speakers to engage in conversation at times that fit their busy lives.
Academic Advisor
Students often need assistance navigating the myriad of problems that arise with paperwork, registration, academic and campus life. A student’s relationship with her/his academic advisor is critical to success. Acting as a mentor and advisor, professors are a tremendous resource and often the only person on campus that a student will turn to for help. The virtual world allows those conversations to occur at times convenient to the student and most importantly fosters the success of the student.
Health Office
Among the most daunting experiences for a second language speaker is a visit to a physician’s office. In-world students can build a relationship with a campus physician’s assistant and practice the difficult medical language necessary to successfully interact with medical personnel, thereby ensuring the health of themselves and their family.
Brainstorming
Collaborative learning is essential to development of workforce skills. Students can meet in-world and collaboratively create written work and projects, as well as practice speaking the target language.
Multicultural Fair
This project highlights the confluence of students’ skills: technology, creativity and language. Students research their native countries and then build their individual booths to display their research. Students visit the event in-world, practice questions and then have the opportunity to record and practice their English.
Project Status
We will continue to work on software development and curriculum integration through the summer, testing the environment as we go along with current students. We will run our first pilot class with second level ESL students in September. We invite you to follow our progress on Facebook.
Brooke is an avid writer who strives to write about topics surrounding the rising emergence of online education and how it could effect the way that students of the future will learn, interact, and contribute to the world around them. Brooke holds a graduate degree in business and is also currently considering further graduate work in the field of organizational behavior.
According to research cited in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, nearly one in three college students takes at least one online class. That figure presents an increase of 10 percent over the prior year and amounts to nearly 6 million students around the country who are enrolled in the virtual classroom. For older-aged working professionals looking to obtain an online graduate degree, the idea of a virtual classroom could appeal to them in that it carries the flexibility of online education but embodies the look-and-feel of the traditional classroom with which they are familiar. Many researchers and students also cite the convenience of the online classroom, which allows students with non-traditional schedules to earn college credit on a more flexible schedule. Many education analysts, however, are wondering just how effective online education really is and what will happen if the virtual classroom becomes the paradigm of tomorrow’s university.
In some respects, online learning has definite advantages over the traditional classroom. A report issued by the U.S. Department of Education found that students taking online instruction performed better than their peers in the traditional classroom. When the online instruction was collaborative or instructor-directed, researchers noted a greater positive effect. Additionally, the most effective learning models involved manipulations that triggered learner activity, self-reflection and self-moderating of understanding.
The effective online classroom is influenced by the behavior of the instructor more than by any other factor. If this factor of instructor excellence were to be combined with future virtual classroom concepts, such as those fostered by the virtual environment enabler Open Wonderland, there is no telling how effective a tool this could be. By having a medium where students can not only immerse themselves into one personable environment from anywhere in the world, but to do so with high-caliber teachers, the entire landscape of education could change drastically. In a study published in the Journal of Interactive Online Learning, John Savery of the University of Akron found that effective online instructors are highly visible through both public and private communications channels, including banner web pages, email, audio and video. Good instructors are also organized, compassionate and analytical, providing continuous assessment so that students can monitor both their progress and their understanding of course topics. Finally, the best online instructors lead by example, modeling appropriate online communication and meeting their own commitments in a timely manner.
The future university classroom will inevitably incorporate digital content. The same Department of Education study also found that students who took courses blending face-to-face and online instruction performed better than any other group. Savery suggests that online instructors set up proctored exams on campus when possible so that online students have a chance to meet their instructors face-to-face. Schools that continue to rely on traditional instruction can support in-class activities via online discussion or by posting course materials online.
When gathering in one location is not possible, social media, video conferencing, or virtual worlds help to provide the next best solution for face-to-face connection. For example, professors can use platforms like Twitter to post assignments or class updates, or students can participate in live Twitter discussions by using a designated hashtag. Instead of discussing via text only, students can also conduct video conferences with their professors or meet in a virtual world. Additionally, solutions like SavorChat can allow professors to schedule chat room discussions combining the use of both Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Online education cuts costs for universities, delivers flexibility for students and enhances the educational experience. With the proliferation of mobile devices, students can connect to their coursework anytime, anywhere. The traditional classroom may never entirely disappear; however, the virtual classroom will support, if not supplant, the face-to-face paradigm.
This month marks the 2nd anniversary of Open Wonderland. In the release meeting last week, the group brainstormed about some of the past year’s highlights.
Wonderland Wednesday Projects
Wonderland Wednesdays continue to be a great way for developers to both learn more about Wonderland development and contribute to the community. They are also an excellent testing ground for new features and bug fixes. In the past year, we have completed one Wonderland Wednesday project, EZMove, and are close to finishing the more recent Telepointer project.
Telepointers: All evidence points to Jagwire
New Monthly Release Cycle
Starting in January 2012, we put into a place a monthly release mechanism. The main goal was to ensure that when people download the Wonderland binary, they are running a recent stable version. With the previous system, someone could download a binary that was almost a half a year out of date, which was causing support issues.
The new system has had a number of unexpected positive consequences. We are now holding monthly release meetings to review which new features and bug fixes should be included in the release. In addition to being another venue for developers to meet and discuss issues, these meetings have provided us with a framework for reviewing bugs and feature enhancement requests (RFEs). During the meetings, we can also enlist volunteers to tackle problems or work on RFEs. Developers are pushing to get code finished in order to have their code included in the next release. We never expected changing the release cycle would have an impact on progress, but it’s turning out that bugs are now getting fixed at a faster pace with more people participating in the process.
Immersive Education Participation
It has been particularly gratifying to see the number of Wonderland projects being presented at the Immersive Education (iED) conferences. Community participation in my remote keynote “show-and-tell” session at the most recent European Immersive Education was amazing. If you haven’t seen it, you can watch the video, or read the blog post about the event.
Community members participating in the European iED conference
Although I’ll be attending in person, I have signed up to do another similar session at the upcoming Immersive Education Summit in Boston June 14-16. Please contact me if you cannot attend the summit in person, but would like to show off your Wonderland world or Wonderland feature in the Boston show-and-tell session.
Start-up Activity
This year there has also been some activity on the business front. The WonderHealth team from Vmersion is looking for funding from the Knight Foundation to create a social networking environment for people with common health concerns. The new environment will allow participants to hear from doctors, share experiences with one another, and discuss educational media together.
Also in the healthcare space, WonderBuilders has entered their new VMed Learning Spaces product offering into the MassChallenge start-up competition. VMed Learning Spaces are a collection of simulated clinical settings such as a doctor’s office, an intensive care unit, an emergency room, a maternity ward, etc. that medical, nursing, and other allied health students can use to practice critical skills.
Example VMed Learning Space by WonderBuilders
Please cast your vote for both these projects on their respective competition web sites to help them gain momentum.
Press Coverage
In the past year, Hypergrid Business and other news outlets have picked up quite a few stories originally posted on WonderBlog. A search for Open Wonderland on Hypergrid Business reveals stories published about Wonderland’s use in Africa, in the +Spaces debating project, in the Singapore Games Village project, in an English as a Second Language project, and in the Virtual Cockpit. You will also find reports on new Wonderland features such as drag-and-drop of Microsoft Office documents, exporting of objects, and streaming a Wonderland world to a tablet.
Hypergrid Business Search Results Page
Final Thoughts
We are looking forward to another year of community projects, collaborations, and interesting activity around Open Wonderland. If you have a Wonderland project you would like to highlight on the blog, simply email a few paragraphs and a screenshot or video to me or to info@openwonderland.org and someone will work with you to edit the article and publish it as a guest post.
Last year on the Open Wonderland anniversary we ran a series of educational workshops to commemorate the event. We’re in discussion about how to commemorate it this year, so please keep your eye out for a discussion the forum on this topic.
Our guest blogger today is Juliana Momodu from Nigeria. A colleague describes her this way: “In the next few years when history is written about women who trail blazed and charted uncharted paths for other women to follow, Juliana Momodu’s name will be written in neon for using virtual technology as a sustainable tool for empowering women all over the world. The use of Open Wonderland will position the African continent as the economic frontier where the torch of leadership is carried by women. Wonderland as a catalyst in education and all facets of African life will help to reposition women at the helm of different businesses and communities as the reawakening of their worth waxes stronger. The doors of communication, information and collaboration are opened across cultures and genders in a borderless world through Wonderland.”
Virtual Technology for Education Vision
By Juliana Momodu
This year’s International Women’s Day theme, “equal access to education, training, and science and technology,” is a powerful affirmation of what I am about and why I am blazing the trail of bringing Open Wonderland to bridge the educational, gender, economic, social, and technological divides in Africa and worldwide.
Background
The world, according to UNESCO Information Statistic (UIS), has 67 million “out of school” children. 30 million of these children are from sub-Saharan Africa and 60% of them are girls! Although the gender gap in education has been decreasing over the past decade, many girls continue to lag behind their male counterparts in equal access to schooling and acquisition of basic skills such as literacy. Reasons include girls marrying early, fathers seeing training a girl that will leave the family to marry as a waste of resources, and girls needed to help to raise other children. In Sub-Saharan Africa, 17 million girls are still out of school; in South Asia, another 9.5 million are shut out.
Education empowers women by improving their living standard. It is the starting point for women’s advancement in different fields of human endeavor. It is the basic tool that should be given to women in order to fulfill their role as full members of the society
Nigeria’s Scenario
Nigeria is a federation of 36 states. The total population is 150+ million, making it the most populated country in Africa. There are 364 languages. English is the official language of business and is widely spoken. Nigeria’s National Policy on Education segments the system into 6 years of primary education, allowing an exit point after 9 years of schooling to continue careers through apprenticeship or other vocational programs.
In 2010, a joint UNESCO-UNICEF report estimated over four million Nigerian girls between the ages of 6 and 11 having no access to primary education. Furthermore, the former Education Minister, Dr. Sam Egwu, once released worrisome and dismal statistics on Nigeria’s out-of-school children. In his ministry’s 2010 ministerial press briefing, Egwu revealed that 17 million Nigerian children had no access to education. This figure, he averred, was made of 11 million children who should be in primary school and six million who ought to be in Junior Secondary School (JSS). He said the level of transition from JSS to Senior Secondary School (SSS) was put at 16 percent, while only six percent of applicants gain admission into universities, polytechnics and colleges of education, because of the crisis of access to the institute.
Problems include:
Lack of classroom space leading to open air classrooms subject to weather fluctuations, leading to class cancellation.
Quality of education offered is affected by poor attendance leading to low rate of educated students. Illness and hunger either of the children themselves or members of the family contribute to the attendance problem.
Teachers are inadequately prepared and morale is low due to basic condition of the work environment and poor salaries.
High cost of schooling includes the costs of books, stationery and basic equipment, uniforms, admission fees, registration and examination fees, contribution towards building and maintenance fund, construction fees, transportation, mid-day meals, Parents/Teachers Association (PTA) fees, sports fees, library fees (even where they are more or less moribund) and extra tuition fees.
Opportunity costs for parents sending children to school is high. The children’s time is often of economic importance to the family either in terms of income generating activities or in supporting the functioning of the household.
Unemployment among school graduates dissuade people from going to school since they see limited economic benefits.
Finally, the low quality of schooling, particularly with regards to poor physical infrastructures, lack of motivated staff, poor utilization of resources, content of curriculum, nature of teaching methods and relationship of the school and teachers with the wider community negatively impact the education system.
Solution: Public/Private Partnerships in Education
It is not possible to grow a nation with uneducated people. Nigeria needs a well trained and motivated workforce to achieve her development objectives. The UNESCO has recommended 26% budgetary allocation to education. To correct the aforementioned problems and transfer the solution to other African countries, we see Open Wonderland as a solution of choice. With this open source technology and our focus on public schools regardless of the distance and level of income, we can be nearer to the Universal Basic Education portion of the Nigerian Millennium Development Goals by 2015, which has been looking unattainable. We need technologies that are simple to teach and learn for both teachers and students alike. They also need to be interactive and fun to encourage their interest, and increase student retention rates.
Using 3D virtual world technology as a catalyst to providing education for all in sub-Saharan Africa, 3D immersive education environments will offer significant improvements over the normal face-to-face, traditional teaching and learning styles. Their interactivity and capability for real-time collaboration across geographical distance, will raise the bar of excellence, promoting global peace through understanding and respecting of each other’s cultures.
To ensure that no child is left behind and education is truly global, Virtual Technology for Education (VT4E) will study, implement, operate and support 3D virtual world environments for schools in Nigeria and other regions of Africa, using collaborative, state-of-the-art platforms and toolkits. Within those worlds, users can communicate with fidelity and security using immersive audio, share live desktop applications, and collaborate in an educational context. Educators around the world are inventing Wonderland worlds for a vast array of topics and a wide range of student populations, which we will be able to take advantage of.
It has been said that to revolutionize the effectiveness of teaching, learning and communication, the workplace is the classroom and technologies are the tools for learning. Multimedia technology can help foster interactive group communication, which is a key to learning. Additionally, some studies have shown that people can absorb knowledge up to 40 percent faster with multimedia and improve retention by up to 50 percent. It is this result that led Yonkers (1195: Yonker, M., Executive Education and Leadership Development, New York; University Park, P.A. pg 20-23) and some other writers to agree that knowledge (K) equals the sum of the people (P), and information (I) multiplied by technology (T) or K = (P) +IT. The promising practice, therefore, is a combination of classroom and technology.
It would be unpardonably remiss if I don’t thank my business partner Michel M. Denis from Internet 3 Solutions for his invaluable belief in the VT4E project shown in his tenacious commitment and work ethic. Our team is just fabulous. He is detailed-oriented and in it for the long haul. He is an architect who is so committed that he even finds the school song of the Nigerian Pilot School without any help from me. Thank you Michel! We have a priceless collaboration in us.
“Technologies are enablers, and when put in the hands of good teachers, the students soar and excel”
-Unknown
“I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn”
-Albert Einstein
I recently collaborated with Amy Cramer, an economics professor at Pima Community College in Tuscon, Arizona. Together, we made a video that demonstrates how Open Wonderland can be used to create a dynamic, interactive environment for teaching online economics classes.
This came about as a result of her school encouraging her to develop a distance education course. She resisted because she was not satisfied with current online course offerings. She did not think they did a good job of engaging students or offering the type of explanatory power of live instruction. On top of that, they involved more work for the instructor because of the volume of discussion text that had to be read and responded to.
These problems led her to explore alternatives. Together, we made this video to illustrate how using Open Wonderland could overcome the issues with web-based courses, while retaining all of the benefits.
The main insight from the video is that live classes that integrate collaborative activities with opportunities to interact with the instructor are considerably more engaging than reading web pages or watching canned videos. Those students who are able to take advantage of the live class will have a superior experience, but students not able to attend can still follow the course by watching video recordings of the sessions.
As I announced at the recent European Immersive Education Summit, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a grant to Springfield Technical Community College (STCC) to create an immersive environment for teaching English as a Second Language. You can read more about the project in these two press releases:
The project is currently in the design phase. One of the particularly nice aspects of this project is that it involves multiple departments at the school. I am currently working with students in the photography department coaching them on how to take and edit photographs for use in 3D modeling. In January, I will be working with graphic arts students to show them how to build models of buildings on their campus and apply the photographs as textures. In addition, I’ll be helping to train staff from various departments such as Financial Aid and Student Affairs on how to staff office hours in Wonderland so that ESL students can practice their conversational skills with actual college staff volunteers.
By the end of the project, STCC plans to have curriculum for four levels of ESL instruction in Wonderland.
Posted by Nicole Yankelovich 
