Loughborough, UK; San José, Calif. US
Wednesday 8th April, 2009
Educators working with students in e-learning classrooms have a new tool that makes teaching easier and more effective in Second Life. The SLOODLE version 0.4 suite of teaching tools is being released today and promises to deliver a more defined and orderly learning experience in a sometimes chaotic virtual world environment.
Version 0.4 integrates Second Life 3D classrooms with Moodle, the world’s most popular open source e-learning system with over 30 million users (http://www.moodle.org). This latest release allows teachers and students to prepare materials in an easy-to-use, web-based environment and then log into Second Life to put on lectures and student presentations using their avatars.
The new tools also let students send images from inside Second Life directly to their classroom blog. Students are finding this very useful during scavenger hunt exercises where teachers send them to find interesting content and bring it back to report to their classmates.
Tools that cross the web/3D divide are becoming more popular as institutions want to focus on the learning content rather than the technical overhead involved in orienting students into 3D settings and avatars.
As an open-source platform SLOODLE is both freely available and easily enhanced and adapted to suit the needs of diverse student populations. And web hosts are lining up to support the platform. A number of third-party web hosts now offer Moodle hosting with SLOODLE installed either on request or as standard, making easier than ever to get started with SLOODLE.
SLOODLE is funded and supported by Eduserv – http://www.eduserv.ac.uk/ and is completely free for use under the GNU GPL license.
The project was founded by Jeremy Kemp of San José State University, California, and Dr. Daniel Livingstone of the University of the West of Scotland, UK.
Livingstone presents SLOODLE 0.4 at this year’s UK MoodleMoot – the Moodle platform’s annual conference – on April 8th, 2009.
Livingstone said, “It’s been exciting working at the forefront of the interface between established, proven web-based technologies and new and innovative 3D approaches to eLearning. We’ve made fantastic progress in the last few months, and this new release of SLOODLE has some major improvements that will help make life a lot easier for many educators and tutors using Second Life. The feedback we’ve had to date from tutors using SLOODLE has been great, and this new release represents a significant step forward.”
Kemp will host a virtual launch party in Second Life itself, followed by a live demonstration session during which participants will have an opportunity to set up and experiment with their own 3D SLOODLE classrooms.
The events start at 2pm US Pacific Time (10pm in the UK) and repeated at 8pm US Pacific Time. The event will be held here:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Sloodle/128/128
At Ohio State University, Dr. Sharon Collingwood (avatar: Ellie Brewster) has been using SLOODLE to support her online Women’s Studies classes held in Second Life. Collingwood said, “SLOODLE fits seamlessly with my own in-house Learning Management System. I was worried that my students would find all this technology confusing, but it’s really simplifying things. There’s the in-house LMS, which I am required to use, for real names, readings, assessment, then there’s SLOODLE, which is for avatar names, group work and blogs.”
Chris Surridge teaches English language to Korean students at the prestigious Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, KAIST. He has been using Second Life for the past few years to host virtual cultural exchanges between Korea, Dubai and Japan.
Surridge said, “SLOODLE improves every tool that it connects. Second Life gets some game, Moodle gets some life, and students get a lot more choices about how, where, and when they express themselves. The new generation of SLOODLE tools, with the Presenter and other developments will open even more possibilities. I can’t imagine using Second Life without SLOODLE now.”
Eduserv Foundation in the UK has invested £150,000 over two years, and the tools have been successfully trialed in online and campus-based classes around the world across a wide range of subject disciplines.
The SLOODLE tools include:
- Presenter: Uses the Quicktime channel to send images, video and web-pages to your audience. You build shows on the Web and control them in SL.
Eliminates fees for uploading image textures and also allows for creative collaborations on the Web before the show begins. (new for 0.4) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVrd4V6KjHM
- Postcard blogger: Students mail SL postcards to the LMS, which automatically converts the photos and text into blog posts. Great for scavenger hunt assignments. (new for 0.4) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiXrXA1A_ok
- WebIntercom: Synchronizes live chat in-world with the LMS chat room and stores chat transcripts on the Web. Students may participate from the web with certified accessible controls. Tested on iPhones!
- Toolbar: Heads-up-display sends blog posts to the LMS, lets students animate their avatar and lists nearby authenticated classmates
- Quiz Chair: Turns multi-choice quizzes into a fun physical simulation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqfBRfwkkrQ
- Pile-on Quiz: A multi-user quiz game show for groups of students
- Prim Drop: Accepts prim objects and logs transactions in the LMS
- MetaGloss: Query the course glossary from in world. Good for illustrating lectures with stored text descriptions
- Choice: Give a survey and show results in 3D charts
- Vending Machine: Place your handouts and objects in the tool and then distribute the objects remotely from the Web or students may collect objects with their avatar.
- Administrative tools: Allow direct avatar-to-LMS account authentication. You will know who your students are and only they will have access to your tools. Enables graded activities and cuts down on confusion with avatar names and identity management. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhXdUUVNiWI
Read documentation on these tools:
http://slisweb.sjsu.edu/sl/index.php/SloodleUserDocs
Contacts
Jeremy Kemp, San José State University, School of Library & Information Science
avatar: “Jeremy Kabumpo”
Daniel Livingstone, School of Computing, University of the West of Scotland
avatar “Buddy Sprocket”
