Loyalist College Border Training from Kingston Life
Read the pull article excerpted here from Kingston Life.
Using Second Life, the popular “virtual world” Internet game, the Loyalist project simulates real-life scenarios for students in the Customs and Immigration program. It was created by academic and New Media Services manager Ken Hudson and his in-house team of animation arts students at the college’s Virtual World Design Centre. The first of its kind in Canada, the program received the Colleges Ontario Innovation Award for 2008.
“This is very much skills-based learning, and it works!” says Loyalist instructor Kathryn deGast-Kennedy, who collaborated with Hudson in developing content for the Second Lifescenarios. Because role playing in the classroom tends to be unrealistic at best, the success rate in developing skill sets through such traditional methods is usually low, deGast-Kennedy notes. But in the virtual world of Second Life, her students have dramatically improved their interviewing skills, from an average mark of 58 per cent in 2007 to 86 per cent a year later. “The difference in the students’ performance was like apples and oranges,” she says.
Second Life users, called residents, interact with each other through graphical representations of themselves, called avatars. Residents can explore, meet other residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, and create and trade virtual property and services with one another. User-generated content comprises a large portion of the activity within Second Life — and that’s what appealed to Ken Hudson when he was seeking innovative ways to enhance the learning process in some programs at Loyalist.
“We basically re-created the U.S/Canada border crossing at Lansdowne, right down to the smallest detail,” he recalls. “Then we created uniforms for the Border Services officers (played by Loyalist students) and brought them into the Second Life world. We gave them some basic instruction on how to move around and communicate, much like in a video game space. After that, it was up to them to interview travellers and practise the screening process.”
At first, the students, ranging in age from their early 20s to late 40s, found the process challenging and were skeptical about using a game to improve their work skills. “But soon they discovered that their virtual and physical identities were essentially the same,” Hudson reports. Research has shown that our brains cognate what happens in a video game’s virtual environment as if it were a real experience, he says.
All of the elements that go into an actual border interview — document checks, licence plate checks and the ability to search vehicles — are built into the virtual experience. As students perform the interviews, their classmates observe the exchange on a large screen in the classroom, and then have a group discussion.
After seeing demonstrations of the Loyalist program, the Canadian Border Services Agency has taken a keen interest in the new technology and is discussing training collaboration possibilities with the college. A government official has also suggested potential applications for simulating airport and marine crossings, as well as scenarios for emergency preparedness. With only “virtual” resources required, the cost to implement such training is much less than is required for traditional training exercises.
Over the past year, Hudson has been invited to speak about the LoyalistSecond Life program at conferences throughout North America, requiring frequent border crossings, himself. Acknowledging that he’s become more conscious of the need for clear communications as a result of working on the program, Hudson says, “I make every effort to be unambiguous in communicating with border officers; it helps them do their job.”
