978-1-5386-2101-1/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE

A survey of e–learning usage in a three-dimensional

virtual environment Second Life

Mario Šipoš, Josip Balen

Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Information Technology

Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek

Osijek, Croatia

mario.sipos86@gmail.com, josip.balen@etfos.hr

Abstract— Online virtual worlds have been a popular tool for

conducting e-learning since they are designed to offer 3D space,

avatars, real-time communication, interaction capabilities and

collaboration. In this paper, we study the impact of using the most

popular 3D virtual environment Second Life as an e-learning

platform. There are many 3D web-based virtual worlds, but the main

motivation for studying the potential of Second Life in education is

that it is recognized as a primary tool for distance learning that has

been used by many prestigious universities. A comprehensive survey

on using Second Life for education and education outcomes in

different disciplines is presented. Besides, this paper studies an

impact of using new technologies on the knowledge acquisition and

motivation of university students.

Keywords— e-learning, education, second life, virtual world

I. INTRODUCTION

It is evident that the Internet has a strong influence on new approaches and solutions in education since it enabled the rise of new learning methods and platforms like e-learning. E-learning enables students to easily reach necessary literature 24/7, communicate with professors, take lectures, exercises, and exams, submit seminars and thesis and many other advantages from anywhere in the world without the need of a meeting in real life with their teacher and professors or physically attending the desired university. Recently, many universities and schools provide even more e-learning materials than the classic ones and are organizing online courses and exams.

The emphasis on using virtual worlds in education grew out of the fact that learning in the virtual world enhances the students interest in learning [1]. The most famous online virtual world is Second Life (SL) launched in 2003 by Linden Lab. On the official web page, users can download the software, join and use a basic account for free. Characteristics of the SL virtual world platform can be seen in the Table 1 [2]. Besides the free account, SL provides the ability to purchase a premium account for buying or renting a virtual land. This benefit has been recognized mostly by US universities but also by many other universities around the globe that are buying virtual land in order to build virtual university buildings. Those virtual buildings are used for lectures, exercises, meetings of teachers and students and all other regular university activities. Participation in the virtual world helps students to be more relaxed and have better

communication with the professors since there is no physical contact. SL supports two ways of communication, via keyboard or by using a voice feature [3] and [4]. In SL users are presented by avatars - a 3D graphical representation of a user. Avatars can walk, teleport, fly or use vehicles to go from one point to another. Users can also build buildings or other materials using built-in tools such as Linden Scripting Language. Build materials, can be sold or purchased using virtual money called Linden Dollars [5], [6], [7] and [8].

TABLE I. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SL VIRTUAL WORLD PLATFORM

Second Life

Open Source No

Free of charge As a visitor/Yes

Programming

Language C++

Support for

Virtual Objects Yes

Avatars Yes

Configuration Yes, with charge

Educational

Tools Yes, Sloodle

Features

Internet browsing, on-line voice chat,

instant messaging, etc.

Easy content creation, scripts

development by end-users

The motivation for this paper was to explore areas in which authors saw the possibility of applying virtual worlds for educational purposes and collect research results. This review can serve the reader to acquire a basic knowledge about the use of Second Life for educational purposes. Also it highlights advantages and disadvantages with which students encounter in e learning.

Rest of the work is organized as follows. Section II describes SL survey and facts. Section III describes usage of new technologies and SL in University education. In Section IV a survey on using SL for e-learning in various disciplines is conducted. Section V concludes the paper.

II. SECOND LIFE SURVEYS AND FACTS

The biggest benefit of a virtual world is that users are able to perform a variety of activities from a real world without physical limitations. However, authors in [9] performed a detailed research on real motivation of individual users to use the SL platform in their life. Participants for this survey were gathered through online communication and 188 SL users from all over the world participated in this research. To motivate users to participate in this study, the authors were giving prizes of 100 Linden Dollars to the user who gave complete answers to questions in the study. Approximately 58% of participants in the study were male participants with nearly 75% were older than 25 years and an average time of using SL platform was between 1 and 2 years. The authors collected two sets of data from participants. The first set included age, gender, education, experience in SL and real-life living area. In the second set of collected data, participants were answering to two questions explaining why and for what a particular reason they had been using SL. The results showed that users use SL mainly due to three reasons: functional (learning and helping with education), experimental (exploring virtual worlds, playing and entertainment) and social. Also, there was a difference in usage of SL between genders, where women used it mostly for shopping and research, while men used mostly it to earn money. The age difference showed that 35 years old or above users use SL mostly for education, while users below 35 years old use it mostly for entertainment. Last but not the least, they concluded that more educated and experienced users recognized the value of SL in education and profit [9].

Guadagno et al. [10] studied how traditional gender role expectations may influence behavior in an online virtual world. The study was conducted on 352 (143 men and 209 women) active users of SL. Based on the previous research in a real world, the authors were searching for differences in behavior between men and women in a virtual world. However, results showed that individuals behave in ways consistent with traditional gender role expectations even in a virtual world.

Research conducted in [11] shows that compared with other virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft (WoW) or Sims online, in SL users are not bound to perform tasks like in a video game rather they can freely explore a virtual world. This kind of the environment enables creativity, experimentation, real time dynamic feedback and it supports learning.

In 2013 SL celebrated the tenth anniversary and the owner, Linden Lab published a full statistic about their users and finances. In the 10 years history of SL 36 million accounts in total were created, with an average of four hundred thousand new users every month. Complete transactions among users for virtual goods were 3.2 billion USD where daily transactions were around 1.2 million USD. More than 2.1 million users created an item for sale, and the most frequently purchased items were women hair style. The most popular categories in the Destinations Guide were games, events, adventure, and fantasy. The equivalent of total time that users have had spent to that date was 217266 years [12]. However, it is obvious that a high growth and user adoption of social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., caused SL to falter and lose users and that trend is still active.

III. NEW TECHNOLOGIES AND SECOND LIFE PLATFORM IN

UNIVERSITY EDUCATION

The development of technology has had a huge influence on the emergence of new approaches in education and learning such as e-learning and m-learning. The biggest advantage of all new approaches in education is that it enables equal education for all groups of people (children, students and the elderly) and provides them easy access to a variety of educational materials and courses. The modern way of education can give an answer to problems such as a high cost of education and physical participation of students in classes [13], [14] and [15].

However, although students have many advantages and they are much more motivated for modern education that uses new technologies it is important to study the influence of it on the knowledge of students. As a part of our other research, we investigated the impact of new technologies on the knowledge acquisition and motivation of 68 university students. Our results show that student who used older technology for their exercises (standard laboratory consists of standard equipment such as classical desktop computers) had 3.4% better results on their exams then the students who used state-of-the-art technology (modern computer equipment such as laptops with touchscreens, large additional monitors, tablets, and an interactive large Samsung LCD TV). In (1) Pearson's correlation coefficient is calculated where Xi variable represents individual student results when using older technology, Yi individual students results when using state-of-the-art technology, and �̅� and �̅� arithmetic means.

(1)

Since the value of the Pearson's correlation coefficient equals

0,806 it can be concluded that the correlation trajectories are positive and that there is a great correlation in the results of the study of the two groups of students in two different laboratories. The correlation is positive linear and has tendency to complete correlation. Therefore, it can be concluded that applying new technologies in University education does not influence a quality of knowledge absorption although students are much more motivated to work with modern equipment and devices.

Mostly the development and popularization of the Internet along with the improvement of personal computers has allowed the emergence of 3D web-based virtual worlds. There are many 3D web-based virtual worlds, but SL is recognized as a primary online tool for distance learning, and it is used by Harvard University, Missouri University, Bradley University and many other educational institutions all over the world. Three key elements give a user sense of presence in a virtual world and make education more interesting when compared to traditional methods. Those elements are: 3D space, avatars, and real-time communication.

Educational process in SL can be seen in Figure 1. It is

evident that professors and students must have access to the

internet so that they can log into SL virtual world. Afterwards,

they can take part in the virtual classroom in the form of avatars.

In the virtual world, they can communicate through voice and

private text chat. Professors use their input devices (keyboard,

mouse or microphone) to teach and assign tasks. Through the

output devices (monitor and headphones) students receive

tasks. In the end, from their output devices, professors can get

information did the students understood properly given tasks

and give further guidance. It is important to note that the virtual

world exists regardless of whether professors and students are

logged in.

Orientation is a fundamental element of all new students who are starting their education at the universities. In this way, educational institutions adapt students to the new environment and raise its reputation. It takes proper preparation to make orientation to served its purpose. The orientation of new students includes helping students to adapt to the premises of the faculty more easily and introduces them to the rules of life at the University. The 3D multi-user virtual environments (3D MUVEs) enable the creation of virtual rooms from real life and thus may provide new students extensive experience to learn about the new environment. Although research papers are focused on full immersive virtual technologies like head mounted display, a cheaper 3D virtual desktop environment also gives good results and is easier to use. In Figure 2 an interaction map that can teleport users to the selected location of Texas A&M University is shown.

Tüzün & Özdinç [16] conducted a survey to investigate the use of 3D virtual worlds for purposes of freshmen students’ orientation in a Computer Education and Instructional Technology (CEIT) Department in Turkey. Fifty-five students were divided into two groups. The first group consisted of twenty-five students (48% female and 52% male), participated in the virtual orientation and the second group consisted of thirty

students (43% female and 57% male) attend authentic departmental orientation. Virtual orientation lasted about half an hour and the students did not have any problems with navigation in the virtual world. The authentic orientation also lasted for half an hour. At the end of orientation, both groups were given a task to draw a sketch of the department. The results showed that the virtual orientation produces the same or better results in comparison with the authentic orientation.

There is a possibility that students do not receive the benefits of learning in the virtual world if simulator does not allow their preferred learning style. Cheng [17] explored 32 undergraduate students learning styles based on their acceptance of SL as a learning tool in a university course called Digital Imaging at a university in Hong Kong. The preferred learning style was visual learning chosen by 81% of participants. The results obtained by the author had shown that most of the students were satisfied with the use of SL for the purpose of learning and that the expression of the avatar can help shy people to overcome their shyness. Furthermore, results also showed that visual learners valued usefulness more, while verbal learners valued communication and avatar creation.

Warden et al. [18] conducted a study to investigate whether gender and lack of previous experience in the gaming put users into less favorable position in learning in a virtual world. Participants were 348 undergraduate students, ages from 20 to 24 years. The authors found that gender and not having experience in playing games do not create significant deficiencies in learning in the virtual world although students with less experience in gaming had lower feelings of presence in the virtual world. The main benefit of users with previous experience in gaming was easier control of an avatar with a keyboard and mouse. Also, they more easily create a sense of presence in the virtual world while users with less experience in playing need more time to achieve it.

Fig 1. Learning model in SL.

Ali et al. [19] conducted an online survey on 425 students at University of Bahrain. The results showed that fifty percent (20% strongly agree and 30% agree) of students agreed that it was easy to use SL for educational purpose. Also, seventy percent (30% strongly agree, and 40% agree) of students agreed that SL is useful for their education.

IV. SURVEY OF E-LEARNING APPROACHES IN SECOND

LIFE WITHIN VARIOUS DISCIPLINES

A. Medicine

Honey et al. [20] described the development of simulator

designed for the teaching of postpartum hemorrhage to undergraduate nursing students. Based on experience gained from nursing programs on University of Auckland, New Zealand, and Boise State University, Idaho, United States, the authors give a list of ten steps with a detailed description which they used in the development of simulator. The aim was to guide other users who intend to build simulators in SL virtual world [20].

Hermanns & Kilmon [21] described a meeting held in SL that took place in the fall of 2010. This session was a psychiatric mental health conference between students and professors of the University of Texas at Tyler. Although they mention certain disadvantages and difficulties they have encountered, the students were very satisfied with the conference held in the virtual world and said they want more of such meetings in the future. Students liked the opportunity to attend the conference from their home since they were relaxed. More timid students admitted that it was easier to participate in the virtual conference and say something that otherwise they would not say in the real conference [21].

Seefeldt et al. [22] presented a pilot study to determine how virtual worlds can be used for simulation of health care team discussions in interprofessional education (IPE). 45 students from different health profession programs from South Dakota State University and the University of South Dakota participated in the study. There were nine groups of students (four to seven each). Meetings were held at South Dakota State University’s virtual island in SL, where only one meeting took place per day from March to April 2011. Each meeting lasted approximately an hour. Although users have reported some technical issues, such as SL audio capabilities and viewer most of the students agreed that SL was a useful tool for conducting IPE activities [22].

Aebersold et al. [23] discussed design and implementation of a virtual hospital unit in SL made by the University of Michigan School of Nursing for running virtual simulations in the training of nurses. Fifteen students participated in the study. Simulation lasted from 10 to 15 minutes in which the participants cooperated with other avatars and met the targets defined by written scenario. After the simulation was over, students gave answers to a survey in which they expressed their opinion on using SL to conduct simulation scenarios. There were five grades from 1 to 5, where 1 equals strongly disagree and 5 equals strongly agree. The average grade for the total experience of students was 3.1.

Tiffany & Hoglund [24] presented a small exploratory study on using SL as a tool for teaching and learning in nursing education. Although the students' opinions were divided only into positive and negative the 10 of 11 students said that using Avatar assigned by instructors helped them in learning.

Successful use of SL learning for undergraduate senior nursing students in family health, disaster preparedness, and home safety areas was reported by Schaffer et al. [25]. These

Fig. 2. Screenshot of Texas A&M University an interaction map that can teleport users to the selected location

three virtual scenarios were made by nursing faculty. All students had previous experience with SL. Students had one clinical day to complete each scenario. The 4-point Likert-type survey was implemented on 48 students. According to the collected data, some of the scenarios were not realistic enough to students.

B. Language learning

The biggest advantage in learning a foreign language online

in virtual worlds users can via avatars interact with native English speakers from the comfort of their own home.

Hsiao et al. [26] developed a 3D task-based English language learning environment to provide learning guidance for 38 EFL beginner students (16 females and 22 males) from an elementary school in Taipei City. The questionnaire was used to gather information do participants find the environment easy to use and is it useful for Englis language learning. The majority find it useful (94,74%) and easy to use (91.73%).

Lin et al. [27] described the two task-based language teaching (TBLT) in SL in order to describe the advantages and disadvantages from the perspective of an experienced and less experienced users. Besides the four mentioned instructors (authors), 144 Chinese language undergraduate students were also involved in the study at a major Australian university. The goal of the author was to share their experience of teaching the elementary level of Chinese as a foreign language in SL. During the experiment, instructors have noticed what could be better to add or adjust, and they liked the way of giving the lecture in the virtual world. A large number of participants was a problem for instructors, especially during oral communication. However, final results showed that teaching in SL could help instructors to provide students quality teaching with multiple opportunities for input, production, and feedback.

Chung [28] described the experiments carried out on undergraduate English learners with a goal to investigate the impact of the virtual material on the motivation and achievement of students. Two groups of students were taught the same material, but one group had a virtual learning via avatars in SL as part of learning. Statistical analysis conducted before and after the experiment showed that students who used the virtual world for learning had better results on their achievement test. The other group had significantly lower results, specially in vocabulary and reading comprehension test.

Hsiao et al. [29] developed a 3D task-based language learning environment which they tested on 38 elementary school students in Taipei City, northern Taiwan. The authors believed that the successful learning of English in the virtual world cannot be achieved without guidance. The final result showed that 3D task-based language learning environment in SL improved English language learning process for elementary school students.

Berns et al. [30] presented Virtual Worlds at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (VirtUAM). This game was built in Open Simulator (OpenSim) platform for training of the German vocabulary for different supermarket products. Participant were

85 Spanish university students that had been enrolled eight months in a German A1.1 language course. This virtual space consisted of five levels: Meeting room, Training room, Quiz-room, Amusement Arcade, and Supermarket. The aim of this levels was to train users listening and reading skills. Time for level completion was from 15 to 40 minutes, depending on level, where Meeting room time depended on individual needs. The results showed that using games makes the learning process more interesting. Furthermore, cooperation or competition with other students in the game motivates students to work harder to complete a task or win a game.

Recent research in the area of use of foreign language

learning was conducted by authors in [31] and [32].

VIRTLANTIS an open access virtual island with free resources

for language learning was used for this study. Participates were

nine students (five female and four male) from around the world.

Age ranged from 21 to 55 years with language knowledge from

beginner to upper-intermediate level. The students met twice a

week in a five-week period. Each practicing oral English virtual

session lasted for 90 minutes, and it simulated real-world

scenarios. The author used two questionnaires one at the

beginning to gather data about participants, acquaint them with

the content of the course and collect their expectations. The

second was used to gather overall perceptions of the course.

Participants were satisfied with the virtual course because it was

fun, they get the chance to meet other cultures, and it was easy

to travel from one place to another and to find in situations to

learn new English words.

C. Other usage

Terzidou et al. [33] presented design and implementation of

Grouping and selecting Attire, Find, Collaborate and Answer (GrAFiCA) - a 3D collaborative knowledge Game in SL. This virtual game consisted of six buildings that represented one specific subject from Multimedia Systems course in a Department of Informatics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. The aim of the game was to motivate students to improve their learning capabilities. The participants were 20 undergraduate students who attended Multimedia Systems course who were searching for hidden questions in the virtual world and answering them. According to two surveys, one before and one after the game, 90% of participants believed that playing games in virtual world enables better knowledge acquisition.

Besides mentioned disciplines SL is also used as an educational tool in many other various areas like Cybercrime and Society [34] or Anatomical Sciences [35] and teaching the basics of 3D modeling and programming in Linden Scripting Language [36].

V. CONCLUSION

The development technology in the past decade has

completely transformed and improved education. New

approaches enabled modern, easy accessible and always

available online education with many benefits for both,

professors, and students. One of the new methods is e-learning

in Virtual Worlds, that is becoming globally very well accepted

educational tool. One of the most famous virtual worlds is the

SL, where users are present by their avatars. Many studies have

proven usefulness and very good acceptance of SL as a main e-

learning platform and it is recognized by many prestigious

universities as a powerful educational tool. Education in SL is

much more entertaining for students than traditional learning

methods and therefore, students are much more motivated to

acquire new knowledge and abilities which is proven by scoring

better results on exams.

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