Virtual World Administration

From the academic year 2007/8 St Andrews started looking at potential for use of virtual worlds in education. Second Life was favoured for a number of reasons, including inte- gration options with external web services and its easy to learn scripting language (LSL). Virtual worlds bring with them a lot of the same administrative issues that apply to the real world. Attendance needs to be tracked at lectures and other events, coursework needs to be submitted to tutors, coursework materials need to be delivered to students, etc.

Additionally, tasks that are normally infeasible to automate in the real world are feasible in virtual worlds, for example setting up experiments for labs, tracking student progress through exploration-orientated coursework and recording content of meetings. There are also tasks unique to administration and virtual worlds (this list reflects the most significant issues encountered, and is not intended to be exhaustive), including:

• Tracking of virtual world identities in relation to real identities, for the purposes of attendance monitoring, course involvement, coursework submission, etc.

• Ensuring students are in the correct place in-world, especially when moving around in-world, for example doing “digital field trips” where groups of students may be taken around a number of areas not managed by the institution.

• Dissemination of teaching materials in-world, for example sample objects, scripts, etc.

• Management of teaching/experimental spaces, for example resetting in-world exper- iments between lab sessions.

• Tracking coursework submission in-world, for example scripting exercises.

The Sloodle6_{project (sponsored by EduServ) provides an integration between Moodle and}

Second Life, however it is focused on teaching aspects rather than administrative.

Account Creation

The first task for introducing students and staff to a virtual world is to create an identity, or account, for them. While virtual worlds provide their own tools for this, web service inter- faces such as the registration API (RegAPI) for Second Life allow institutions to provide custom interfaces for account creation.

Integrating MMS with RegAPI means details such as e-mail address and date of birth can be automatically provided for users, as well as ensuring users start ”Minerva Island“, the university’s private island in Second Life. The LLSD7 (Linden Labs Structured Data) li- brary developed for this integration is currently the reference implementation for Java8_.

In creating the accounts, MMS can also record the UUID (universally unique identity) of users, allowing teaching staff to identify students in-world. Currently there is no option to associate pre-existing accounts with MMS users, however there is no technical reason this could not be added.

As of the time of writing, RegAPI has no provision for administrating accounts once they are created, nor for performing authentication using an external authority. This can be problematic if users have a problem with their account, as they logically expect the system that created the account to be able to make changes such as password reset.

6_{http://www.sloodle.org/- accessed 23rd June 2013}

7

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LLSD- accessed 14th July 2013

Coursework Submission

One problem highlighted by early experiments with coursework in Second Life was how to submit in-world assets for assessment. Content protection or digital right management (DRM) in virtual worlds such as Second Life can restrict the permissions users have with content they receive from other users. By default content created in Second Life cannot be copied or modified by anyone apart from the original creator, and students often did not change these settings.

As a result, student coursework that attempted to create copies of itself as part of its normal operation failed when passed to the tutor for marking, as it was considered “unlicensed duplication” by the DRM. Lack of modify permissions also meant that teaching staff had no ability to read source code (which is locked under the security model), or to attempt to repair the damaged submissions[7][103].

While instructions were provided on protocol for submission of virtual world assets as coursework, students were used to a more formal and guided process, and a one-off alter- native submission process appeared to cause significant confusion. From an administrative point of view, submissions lacked clear timestamps for when they were submitted, and students had no submission receipt. There is a clear need for tools to support coursework submission within virtual worlds, for example verifying permissions on work before sub- mission, as well as providing receipts for work as MMS does for submission of work as files.

Outcomes

Use of virtual worlds with groups of undergraduate students at St Andrews remains gen- erally low, typically comprising part of one or two modules in each academic year. There is further activity with groups of prospective students as part of open days, and in research (especially postgraduate research). The preferred virtual world platform has since been re- placed with the open source OpenSim, which provides significantly more flexibility as the underlying engine can be modified by the researchers[3].