entornos de aprendizaje virtuales
SIMAULA Project: "Learning how to teach can also be a fun and entertaining activity"
SimAULA is a project focused on the development of a virtual practicum for teacher training in the form of a 3D virtual world. Both current and future teachers will have the opportunity to interact with avatar-students, develop lesson plans and teach in virtual classrooms. We talk with the project coordinator, Eva Vázquez de Prada.
What’s the objective of Simaula?
Simaula’s main objective is to develop a virtual practicum for teachers and future teachers. This virtual environment will provide Higher Education institutions and schools with a very innovative training platform to enable the enhancement of teaching abilities through result-driven classroom practices.
The knowledge of teachers and pedagogy and psychology experts helped us define models to create simulations and situations that are both pedagogically and educationally realistic.
Could you describe how a virtual classroom look like?
The project developed a 3D virtual classroom where the teacher can interact with avatars (the students), develop lesson plans, and teach.
The training platform replicates typical situations where teachers face common problems that happen in real classrooms. The teacher will have to select different options for each situation taking into account the teaching strategy, the pupils profiles, their level of attention, the classroom type, etc.
Students (avatars) will automatically react to the teacher selection depending on their behaviour model, the teaching strategy, their classmates, the duration of the class, ...
At the end of the game, the teacher gets a score that is calculated according to the global involvement of the students during the class (this depends on the students' behaviour and how the teacher deals with their interruptions during the game), the choices made by the teacher regarding teaching methodology, the learning resources that the teacher uses, the learning activities and the time spent on each activity.
Besides from the score, the teacher also gets a final feedback describing why he got that score and how he can improve it.
Does this programme respond to a demand from teachers?
The idea of developing Simaula came from the specific demand of different universities that were implementing the new Bologna Process. They realised that they were experiencing different problems managing the increase of the number of in-school practicum hours.
We also conducted a research during the project and we identified several problems of a different nature that the students, tutors and host teachers face during the teaching practice: administrative barriers, organizational barriers, pedagogical, psychological and methodological barriers. We believe that Simaula can help in many ways to overcome these barriers.
Why use serious games to train teachers?
Several studies demonstrate the efficacy of serious games for training in particular through behavioral change.
Serious games help to create a good simulation of real-life learning situations, allowing trainees to go over the same situations, settings, contexts in a low-stress environment. Simaula also promotes experimentation with various techniques and allows meeting learners’ individual needs, interests and abilities, all this in a safe environment.
We also believe that learning how to teach can also be a fun and entertaining activity
Is it possible to virtualize the pupils’ behaviour?
We are aware that modeling students' behaviour is a very complicated task and there are many researches going on now in Europe focused on this. But that’s not Simaula's main objective.
We modelled the five most characteristic behaviours of students in 6th grade (Talkative, Skeptic, Moaner, Joker and “Flower pot”), based on our own research. We wanted the teacher to learn how to react to the most common situations that can occur in a classroom. But we also modelled the classroom types according to the different teaching methodologies (Learning through experiment, collaborative learning and Problem based learning), the choice of ICT and learning resources. And finally, we designed the pedagogical model based on the choice of the available learning activities in order to achieve a particular learning objective.
Do you think game-based learning will replace classical training?
In the specific case of Simaula project, we believe that this training platform could be a very powerful tool to complement the in-school practices for future teachers. Simaula provides universities and schools with a very innovative simulation system that enables them to be more flexible (with less barriers of time and distance), more efficient and to better adapt to the Bologna process. This is because Simaula provides opportunities for professional training in safe, multimodal, and personalised settings. The students engage in learning activities from their homes or from the university computer labs.
Simaula can help to develop trainees’ confidence and increase their motivation (the feelings of uncertainty, fear of failure are minimized).
Simaula can also support the transfer of acquired knowledge and skills from the controlled educational setting to the real classroom and provide the opportunity for development of professional skills and their transfer to new contexts, including a variety of constructivist models of learning: collaborative learning, learning through experiment, problem based learning etc.
Call for Papers: IADIS e-Society 2013 conference
The IADIS e-Society 2013 (13-16 March) conference aims to address the main issues of concern within the Information Society. This conference covers both the technical as well as the non-technical aspects of the Information Society. Broad areas of interest are eSociety and Digital Divide, eBusiness / eCommerce, eLearning, New Media and E-Society, Digital Services in ESociety, eGovernment /eGovernance, eHealth, Information Systems, and Information Management. These broad areas are divided into more detailed areas.
For this new edition of IADIS e-society conference, you're warmly invited to submit your papers on one of the following subjects.
• Collaborative Learning
• Curriculum Content Design & Development
• Delivery Systems and Environments
• Educational Systems Design
. E-Citizenship and Inclusion
• eLearning Organisational Issues
• Evaluation and Assessment
. Political and Social Aspects
• Virtual Learning Environments and Issues
• Web-based Learning Communities
Types of submissions: Full and Short Papers, Reflection Papers, Posters/Demonstrations, Tutorials, Panels and Doctoral Consortium. All submissions are subject to a blind refereeing process.
Please submit your paper until 29 October 2012.
Reinvigorating Online Education
How do you reinvigorate virtual communities so as to create dynamic interaction between online teachers and students? The Reinvigorating Virtual Environments manual, (available in Spanish as Dinamización de Entornos Virtuales) collects some of the best practices that aid in encouraging active participation and nurturing enriching eLearning experiences.
In today's world, many current and developing styles of education incorporate online tools that facilitate a horizontal model of communication, one that involves a higher degree of listening, dialogue, and transparency than previously possible.
Much of the virtual environment we use on a daily basis is still uncharted, however, and the rules and guidelines of best practices have yet to be defined in many cases. In the context of eLearning, teachers and students around the world face the challenge of adapting traditional education patterns to a new medium.
The Reinvigorating Virtual Environments manual, (available in Spanish as Dinamización de Entornos Virtuales) collects some of the best practices that serve to foster an online learning experience rich in dialogue, active participation, discussion, and feedback.
The handbook highlights some pointers essential to any course, such as time management and manners, which, though basic, require new standards for a 2.0 world. Internet netiquette has its own set of rules, for example, such as how to initiate a forum discussion, what kind of font to use or avoid, and how to confront trolls.
Other aspects of teacher-student and peer-peer interaction also vary in the online classroom, and so the manual also covers how to include tools like the telephone, skype, chats, forums, and more to better manage group projects, assessment and grading, and tutoring.
The report cites the fun theory as a way of stressing the importance of balancing hard work with creativity, good humor, and fun, prompting readers to really make the most of eLearning.
The full manual is available in Spanish here: Dinamización de Entornos Virtuales (Reinvigorating Virtual Environments).
TICE 2012
TICE 2012 is an opportunity for scientists, from Computer Science to Educational Psychology, for teachers of all disciplines, for companies offering innovative solutions for teaching, and for human resources professionals to present their projects and forge partnerships in the following areas:
- Virtual environments (serious games, 3D virtual worlds);
- Social networks and collaborative learning;
- Self-training, informal learning (Lifelong learning) and mobility.
Themes:
This year conference general theme is ‘New pedagogies and new technologies’. We expect a special focus on the following areas:
- Virtual environments (serious games, 3D virtual worlds);
- Social networks and collaborative learning;
- Self-training, informal learning (Lifelong learning) and mobility.
Topics include (but are not limited to) the following:
- Learning environments (Personal Learning Environment, Web 2.0, Learning and social networks, collaborative Learning environments, interactive simulations, serious games, mobile and pervasive Learning environments, intelligent tutoring systems, etc.)
- Tel models and theories (Learning theories and models, cognition theories, cognition architectures, affects, learner models, knowledge models, interaction models, pedagogical models, ontology engineering, etc.)
- Software engineering and TELs (design process, methodologies, standards, component-based approaches, agent-based approaches, service-oriented approaches and cloud computing)
- Innovative interactions (Learning objects, Metadata and Learning resource indexing, Virtual agents, Educational data mining, etc.)
- TEL usages and evaluations (empirical studies, evaluations, TEL usability testing, etc.)
Important deadlines:
- Registration opens: April 10th, 2012
- Deadline for early registration: October 21st, 2012
- Online registration closes: December 2nd, 2012
- Deadline of abstract submission: September 10th, 2012
- Acceptance notification: October 8th, 2012
- Receipt of final papers: October 21st, 2012
For submission details and formats, go to the submission web page.
The main language for this conference is French but authors can submit paper written in English.