A Virtual World Orientation for St Andrews
Dr Ishbel Duncan, University of St Andrews
Introductory Details
Title and Aims
“A virtual world orientation for overseas students”, known as ViStA for short (Virtual St Andrews), was
originally conceived to be a safe world environment for prospective overseas students to adjust to selfdirected learning as well as find out information about the University.
Overseas students would be able to peruse and interact with city and university information in a virtual world
simulation of St Andrews University. The simulation would allow familiarity with the geography of the city of
St Andrews. Once key parts of the virtual university were built, activities would be structured to enable
student participation, encourage friendships and contacts, and ease transition into the UK academic culture.
Students would theoretically be better prepared for starting university, more engaged with the Institution and
initiated onto the path of autonomous learning via a safe medium.
Context and rationale
One year postgraduate students studying at Masters level have very little time to be inducted, oriented and
then embedded into their courses, residences and University life before producing work at postgraduate level
in English, often as a second language. Consequently, it was considered an efficient and fruitful enterprise to
build a virtual world, akin to Second Life, in which potential students could enter and walk through the city
and University of St Andrews, meet with other students and staff and find out about issues relevant to them,
such as joining student societies or matriculating.
We have experience of using virtual worlds within the School of Computer Science and with other Schools in
the University:
 The School of Archaeology for virtual archaeological digs;
 The School of Management for a simulation of a humanitarian disaster;
 The School of History for reconstructions of our medieval Castle and Cathedral. These projects also have
input from Historical Scotland.
It is therefore a logical extension to develop a virtual University environment for the third of our students,
over 2000 in number each year, who come from overseas, in order for them to interact with the University
before their arrival, in a non-threatening and self-paced environment.
Each of our academic Schools, the IT Service, the English Language Teaching (ELT) unit, library services etc.
spend enormous amounts of time inducting the new students at the start of each academic year. Students
might have an improved induction experience if they were more aware of where units were physically sited
and what processes and procedures they had to complete to gain access to resources. Overseas students are
a special group with language barriers and possibly social barriers to surmount. Further, they are possibly
unaware of Scottish University structure and practices which can be a hindrance to understanding by novice
students. By demonstrating accessibility, we hope to develop good relations with overseas students before
they arrive, and alleviate any fears they may have, while guiding them through some of the important
information they need. We wanted the students to engage with the University in a fun and positive way, and
with other students, current and prospective, to encourage safe, social interaction.
Helping students understand the layout of the University as well as practices and procedures will improve the
new students’ study readiness. The University has already contracted the time spent on student orientation,
the impact of which will depend on the efforts put in by both School staff and the new students themselves.
However, the use of virtual worlds and interactive technologies will allow for self-driven students to get to
know the University and relevant staff, and possibly encourage peer interaction before arrival. The project
therefore does not directly impact onto teaching and learning, but there should be a positive and measurable
effect from prior engagement and participation.
People
Ishbel Duncan (PI), Janie Brooks (CI), Alan Miller (CI), Sarah Kennedy, Iain Oliver and Yaning Du from the
University of St Andrews have worked on the project. Sarah was directly responsible for world building and
Iain did the associated networking and web support. Yaning interviewed many overseas students and collected
material, whereas Ishbel, Janie and Alan were responsible for direction, concept material and management.
Carys Adamson of ELT also helped with ideas and support.
Management
We held weekly meetings some of which included demonstration either in ELT or in the School of Computer
Science. We each had tasks to do with either building in-world objects, with creating content or with
interviewing or taking pictures of University buildings.
Timescales
The original plan was for the prototype virtual world to be built by the end of July and for the evaluation to
occur in mid-August, allowing time to reflect and review. There have been slight delays because of vacation
time and problems with finding time for summer school overseas students to evaluate the virtual world. The
PI was also absent at a critical time because of a bereavement. However, the project is only slightly behind
schedule with evaluation sessions scheduled for the weeks of the 3rd and 10th September.
Main document
Key outcomes
Work package 1: Phases 1 and 2 were the building of the virtual prototype and concentrated on important
facets and information to be displayed. This has advanced to allow for the evaluation phase to commence. The
focus of the build has been on St Salvator’s Quad which is one of the oldest parts of the University. In the
Quad buildings, which include the College Halls, the Schools building and the Chapel, prospective students can
view short videos on famous people, traditions and the history of St Andrews. These videos include
graduations, balls, student events, some residences and academic school information. The Chapel is used to
demonstrate the history of St Andrews University. Outwith the Quad, further virtual buildings include the
Advice & Support Centre (ASC) and the Accommodation Office, both of which incorporate static and
dynamic information of use to prospective students. Phase 3 evaluation has just occurred. Appendix 1 shows
some images of the virtual St Andrews.
Work package 2: This work package was concerned with the orientation process itself. Phase1interviews of
key staff have produced potential scenarios as well as important information already in use in the virtual
world. Phase 2 building of scenarios has already started although most of the information available for in2
world will be dynamic rather than interactive. We intend to continue developing some more in-world avatars
to indicate, for example, directions to information or the times of the next online chat session.
Work package 3: The technical storage and virtualisation has continued as planned alongside the development,
but more evaluation trials will test the load on the system when multiple visitors are in-world at the same
time.
Work package 4: The questionnaire used to evaluate the virtual world is attached as Appendix 2. New
students are currently testing the system, and the results of the questionnaires to date indicate that the
students find the system easy to use without requiring them to learn in advance how to move avatars or even
how to initiate the system. This information was provided via a two page handout and the test students all
managed to gain entry to ViStA within a few minutes, see Appendix 3. Students felt confident using the system
and moved around the majority of the world in the time provided. Students desired to meet staff and other
students in-world, but the responses to attending virtual world lectures indicated little interest. A positive
finding was that students felt they knew more about the University once they had played with the system and
many verbally commented that they wished they had had access prior to coming to St Andrews. We take this
as vindication that our system is useful and useable and we plan to make ViStA accessible by current
prospective students.
Work Package 5: We have started dissemination within the University of St Andrews and already have an
external trial using Scottish school pupils planned in the coming session. Although they are not overseas
students, the trial will help check our network loading, login and registration issues.
We are about to demonstrate ViStA to our Student Advice & Support Centre (ASC), the Admissions Service
and the Recruitment unit to both thank them for their help and to show them how easy the system is to use.
We will also provide information leaflets to go out to prospective and current students. We are currently
planning papers for submission to the International Association for Development of the Information Society
(IADIS) e-society conference and for CSEDU 2013, the International Conference on Computer Supported
Education, as well as for the HEA Italics journal. There will be an in-world research room for our virtual
education research. The world itself is publicly available through a web link and will be accessible through the
University’s own web pages.
Challenges overcome
It has taken longer than expected to get materials or agreement for the use of materials from some of the
University’s units and student organisations. Everyone we asked was positive and keen to be involved, but it
took time to get to the official responsible for agreeing the use of material.
Consequently the accommodation information, for example, is static, but we will be uploading videos of
residences once those have been released for our use. Student organisation information will be made more
accessible once the new academic session starts as previous student officers were in exam mode when we
asked for access. As with any project, we learned that gathering information took much longer than expected,
but we have made many useful contacts within the University.
Local restaurants, shops and societies were also keen to have their shop fronts duplicated in-world, to
visualise street scenes correctly in the city.
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Another issue has been that of language. As the project is for overseas student orientation, it would have
been useful to have information displayed and duplicated in major languages. However, that was found to be
too complicated to address in this first prototype, and we will explore options with future Masters
Dissertation projects. A multi-lingual world is a possibility although this has to be considered against our
original intention of helping overseas students understand our university by immersing them in a virtual St
Andrews. Ultimately, the project has raised many issues of interaction, self help and information organisation
that we could not address in the short time provided. The world that has been built has had much interest
within the University of St Andrews and we expect to have to manage information from many sources,
including academic schools, student support units, and student societies and alumni communities wishing to
give advice to prospective students. Internal information dissemination will be a major part of our project
management in the future.
Findings
We discovered that ViStA was a good vehicle for us to uncover issues that faced new students, and also for
students to suggest questions, mechanisms and scenarios for us to cater for. Many students also indicated that
they would be willing to interact with the virtual world to play with it, extend it and link to it from their own
social networking pages. Students wanted a larger number of interactive avatars to discover more about and
from ViStA, and for a greater part of the University and town to be represented in-world, all of which we
have planned to build in later editions. One student commented that it would be desirable to have more
information about the town and its services, such as which shops stock suitable clothing or computer ware,
whereas another wanted a tour of the area embedded. The common issues were concerned with information
about accommodation, halls of residence and student societies to judge the available social life in the
University, rather than what could be found on the official University website about academic schools and
research status.
We realised that we had to be careful to provide a variety of avatars for the students of different sex, colour
and build. Some students commented that they wanted to be sure to get an avatar of the same sex and to be
able to adjust its appearance, which they could already do in ViStA. Several students indicated that they would
be keen to develop objects or buildings for ViStA and were keen to sign up to work with us for their
dissertations. We also noted that students wanted “fun” things to do in-world although we were not given
any indication as to what that would be.
The benefits of creating a virtual St Andrews were not simply constrained to having fun with student
interaction, but the cycle of enquiry and creation allows both staff and students to engage with each other to
build something of value to them all. Staff are learning what the main issues are with prospective students, and
also how to engage with them in a less static or linear way. Although teaching in-world is not planned for our
world at this stage, interacting with groups of students in advance of their entry has indicated that the
presentation of study skill sets, for those wishing to be more prepared before arrival, may need to be adapted.
A side effect for staff involved in this development is the need to consider how to present information in a
more interactive, and perhaps attractive, way with attention to the use of language for overseas students.
Students with good IELTS scores may still struggle with understanding context, dialect or direction. Thus our
teaching or knowledge exchange practices must necessarily change to accommodate these new environments.
Within Computer Science, our students are keen to develop objects and engineer AI-style avatars.
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ELT students have shown interest in allowing avatars to chat in other languages. Archaeology and history
students are keen to develop the different layers of the world, seen in modern times as well as in the
medieval era, but all these students need a variety of subject skills, artistic skills and communication skills to be
able to develop items in-world. Team work is essential as well as attention to detail. Students have
demonstrated engagement with ViStA and shown that a simple, safe, visual environment can spark dialogue
and interaction. Many students were keen to learn more about St Andrews, about the interactive mechanisms
and about the technological constraints of building virtual worlds. ViStA stimulated discussion and engagement
between staff and students indicating that virtual worlds are useful for facilitating communication at multiple
levels of discourse.
Prospective students using ViStA will not only have a learning experience to allow them to proceed towards
study readiness, but will learn and interact at their own pace with privacy and no time restraint. Our test
students certainly demonstrated interest and wanted more out of their in-world experience, indicating that a
full virtual university world is desirable.
The University institution has shown interest in building an accurate record of the University, as well as the
town not only to attract overseas students but also to engage those students in a dialogue from the start of
their initial enquiry. ViStA would have to be connected to student data in a private manner to allow
interactive avatars to recognise potential, as opposed to accepted or current, students. Students and staff will
be able to upload video files and general information through an update mechanism that we are implementing.
Further, the University is keen to display heritage items as a permanent and public record of rare and
precious objects and develop the historical record of the castle and cathedral as well as the two main
university quadrangles.
Sustainability
The virtual world will continue to grow as our current Masters and Honours students can add rooms or
scenarios to describe their experiences of St Andrews. Allowing current overseas students to add information
they feel is necessary for compatriots to know will help future students. It should thus be a self-sustaining
project once it is officially launched.
If our prototypes demonstrate successful modes and aspects of interaction, measured by user participation,
structured interviews and questionnaires etc., then more activities will be developed for prospective and new
students to engage with. This should have a direct effect on student activities in the pre-sessional periods, on
student social activities and on staff-student relations. We posit that this will encourage peer interaction and
elicit self directed learning. There is a link to ViStA through Facebook, and we hope that ViStA will become
the localised social network and will be effectively bi-directional between staff and students. Measuring
engagement through time spent and interactions made will indicate patterns of usage and points of interest.
Developing the points of interest further will allow us to extend our world into scenarios created for and by
students allowing sustainability, self directed learning and engagement.
Reflection
Although we originally posited that students would be keen to find out about a University’s traditions, lifestyle and ethos, as well as necessary procedures such as matriculation, financial aspects and the academic
advisers that students had to meet on arrival, Ms Du discovered that overseas students were concerned
about accommodation and travel. Overseas students tend to hear about ancient universities through news
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reports or historical programs about famous people who attended the University. Online information will tell
the prospective student in general terms about the University and its research status, but students want to
know about non-academic issues such as how to get to the city, what is the quality of the accommodation and
which student societies are not based around alcohol. For that reason, we will continue to interact with our
overseas and EU Masters students and build scenarios for our virtual world around what they consider
important.
The process of building the world was time consuming and dependent on two main researchers who
developed the objects and built the world as well as maintaining the server application. Reflecting back, we
could have employed more people to do the initial build so that the basic buildings were further developed.
However, that had to be compared to the amount of effort involved in discussions between researchers, and
in our case it was found that it was easier if one person built objects, another concentrated on the web and
server information required and another gathered the information to be placed in-world. Consequently, if a
larger group were to be employed to build a larger virtual world, with more activities and interaction, then
stipulating and building style or component libraries to share and separating out the concerns of the individual
researcher should be paramount. Otherwise, time is wasted reconfiguring or redrawing objects, or moving
objects or avatars in-world. These are typical management issues which can be avoided, as we did, with a
small team. Our world is small, but growing steadily and robustly, and we consider this a better option than
having a piecemeal but larger world to investigate. We are now at a stage where we can allow students to
build new artefacts, scenarios or avatars because the original team share a vision about what we want our
world to be: engaging, useful and interactive to prospective students.
The importance of internal dissemination of the project and its aims in the early stages was crucial to
obtaining the support of various University services represented in-world. For example, colleagues in the
Student Support and Advisory Centre (ASC) quickly became committed to the project, and through
discussions around the ViStA project saw a possibility of delivering services to pre-arrival students in ways the
ASC had not previously contemplated e.g. avatar-to-avatar in-world exchanges. In turn, these discussions
raised issues concerned with the privacy of in-world communication for which we now need to find a
technological solution.
Recommendations
The major recommendation that we make is that more effort be expended on the discovery period during
which time students can submit ideas or scenarios that they would have found helpful or appropriate.
Consequently a project of this nature requires a long lead time prior to the technical build phases. Although
we have completed most of what we set out to do, the timescale of the project has not been conducive to
finessing our scenarios or extending our information base. The world is therefore small and incomplete,
allowing students to discover information from buildings over a short geographical distance. However, one
student did comment that it was more interesting, and faster to find information through a virtual world than
through walking around the town or searching the University’s website.
Although our development will not affect University procedures, what it does indicate is the student’s journey
through information gathering. Consequently, this will inform the admissions and recruitment processes as
well as the academic schools. By tracking what students are interested in, and the order in which they find or
search for information, we have a better idea of overseas students’ requirements.
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As a prototype, the project has most definitely been a success in terms of interest from the University and
from students who wish to participate for the benefit of future students. Our virtual world is actually bringing
together units and Schools in the University wishing to share expertise and inform each other. As a by
product of the original intention of the virtual world, we have found a shared interest in shaping the
University’s identity and the student experience.
We recommend that other UK universities think about a virtual world presence as a way of interacting
meaningfully with potential students. Although it is time consuming and slow to build in the initial
development phase, students are genuinely interested in new technologies and keen to explore and add
information, just as they add to social networking sites. Virtual worlds are a more interactive social network
where students can meet, find information and leave information for others through posters or comments.
Further, students can interact easily in-world through chat mechanisms, allowing them to feel more involved
and engaged in the environment.
Other UK universities should consider building virtual worlds as a better way of describing their city and
institution to prospective students. To create a world one simply needs servers and either the OpenSim
software or the more expensive SecondLife platform. We prefer OpenSim as it is free and adaptable and
students can develop objects in world that are free to use, although it is entirely possible to build in
mechanisms for earning money from say, building graduation gowns for an avatar to wear once the student
has graduated, or sending virtual birthday cakes. We would recommend that the initial build is kept small with
a small team driving the design and initial phases. Once the basic layout and styles have been agreed, the
virtual world can become a shared research project for students across the University, building events or
scenarios related to their own School or society.
At worst, it is a fun advertising element for the University; at best, it is a shared resource to enable and
support teaching through engagement, to interest diverse groups of students wishing to input their own ideas
and most importantly, to help guide prospective students through the maze of information at the start of an
academic year.
We will search for more funding for this project and continue to build the virtual world. It is expected that inworld chat rooms will allow prospective students to “attend” meetings with current students and staff and
lead to self generation of more activities. Dissemination is the key to developing our virtual world and we
thank the HEA for the opportunity to develop the prototype.
Ishbel Duncan, Janie Brooks & Alan Miller,
August 2012,
St Andrews
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