In 2012 Dr Scott Grant from Chinese Studies at Monash University and Dr Christina Mayer from Arabic Studies at the University of Melbourne created an immersive linguistic and cultural learning experience in the virtual world of Second Life.
The idea was to enable students of Arabic language and culture studying in Australia to experience a small slice of life studying at a university in an Arabic speaking country. The overall scenario involved the students via their avatars meeting with a local student in the lunch area of a university in Egypt. After exchanging basic personal information in Arabic, the local student invites the “foreign” student to their home for a typical Friday lunch. In the next part of the scenario the “foreign” student goes to the home of the local student, is introduced to the family, and shares a home cooked lunch with them.
The idea behind the project, in addition to providing students with an immersive situated learning experience, was to see if this cultural and linguistic content could be learned by students in their own time at least as well as they could learn it in a more traditional face-to-face tutorial. If this new method was at least as effective as a traditional tutorial, the possibility would exist to free up face-to-face class time for content that could only be taught in that mode, while this cultural and linguistic content could be learned in students’ out-of-class time. Analysis of student surveys conducted during the project showed that the average score of students who engaged in the immersive virtual world scenario were marginally higher than those who learned the same content in a traditional tutorial.
The following are a series of demonstration videos shot prior to piloting the project. In the videos the male and female “foreign” student roles are played by the one avatar. The roles of the local students and their family members are played by programmed NPC (non-player characters). The real students interact with the NPCs (and the virtual environment) via the virtual mobile phone seen on screen. Using programmed NPCs allows students to repeat the scenarios as many times as they like.
For more details on what is happening in each video, please open in YouTube.
