Distance learning problems in SL

To balance my previous happy post about the success of the face to face SL project, I must now cast some doom and gloom on the distance learning side of things. I am Scottish, you know. It's not in the national psyche to be too optimistic.

We have a campus in Dubai, and the students there are meant to learn in parallel to the Edinburgh students on the same modules. I thought it would be possible to run the multimedia design module in SL because a massively multiplayer environment would appear to be plausible for distance learning. Well it ain't!

We have had a lot of trouble with the module as a whole, partly because the on-site  tutor was unfortunately ill at the start of term, and so the Dubai class is running behind the Edinburgh one. We have had huge communication problems with the students about what is expected for their assignment, but I will focus on the SL related problems here. We provided help in-world by the Edinburgh based lab helper at specified times, as well as in class general instruction by the on-site teacher using my materials.

• We had low take-up of lab sessions from students - not sure why but may be due to the fact that the students are part time and also have jobs. It may be that they underestimated the difficulty of the module because it seemed like playing games.
• The tutor and students found it hard to communicate (using text chat rather than voice - bandwidth is a problem). If there is a convention of how to run a lab class in SL I would like to know about it - how do the students know when it is polite to ask a tutor a question, how do they queue etc?
• We had problems in giving students access permissons to edit terrain and build on group land. The same set up we used with Edinburgh students didn't seem to work and it is almost impossible to work out why when you can't see the student's screens.
• No matter what settings we tried we couldn't quickly view the students' scripts to help them solve problems. The tutor had to get them to email the code to her and then she would paste it into an object in SL to try for herself. This is very time consuming. The copy/modify permissions didn't seem to help. If anyone know how to solve this problem PLEASE let us know!

So all in all, it has been very difficult for a number of complex reasons. It is fair to say that SL contributed to problems rather than alleviating them. See - technology is not going to solve all distance learning problems! I rather doubt that anyone in university management will ever read this, but in the off chance they will, I repeat: technology is not going to solve all distance learning problems!