The University of Kansas Medical Center (KUMC) has developed a Nurse Anesthesia operating room simulation in Second Life for learning the basic induction process. They identified three major learning solutions for Second Life:
- For courses dealing with gaming, online communities, and emerging technologies, students can study the Second Life technology itself.
- Other faculty use Second Life as a communication medium, focusing on delivering in-world lectures, making presentations, and conducting discussions.
- Finally, faculty can use Second Life as a learning space for in-world learning activities, such as role playing, interactive simulations, and educational games.
The article discusses the history of Second Life on the KUMC campus, and goes into great detail on the development of the nursing simulation. An audio transcript accompanies the article.
As you get to the end of the article, pictures demonstrate how life-like the environment is in Second Life. It is hard to tell the real equipment from simulation.
Conclusion from the article:
Training students in the physical space of the operating room was expensive for the Nurse Anesthesia department. They needed a more flexible space for students to learn a complicated process. The Second Life simulation provided the department with a virtual learning space having many interacting objects and without the constraints of a physical space. Furthermore, students could easily access the virtual space without permission or a standing appointment, giving them more flexibility.
The Nurse Anesthesia simulation gave students the opportunity to focus on the steps and the process before learning the tactile use of objects in the basic induction process, which they would learn in the physical operating room. Using Second Life gave us the opportunity to develop a virtual leaning space based on the educational needs of the Nurse Anesthesia department, instead of modifying their needs to fit inside another physical learning space.
Read more from the the EDUCAUSE Quarterly-
Virtual World Learning Spaces: Developing a Second Life Operating Room Simulation
