Exploring Design Requirements for Repurposing Dental Virtual Patients From the Web to Second Life: A Focus Group Study

Abstract

BackgroundSince their inception, virtual patients have provided health care educators with a way to engage learners in an experience simulating the clinician’s environment without danger to learners and patients. This has led this learning modality to be accepted as an essential component of medical education. With the advent of the visually and audio-rich 3-dimensional multi-user virtual environment (MUVE), a new deployment platform has emerged for educational content. Immersive, highly interactive, multimedia-rich, MUVEs that seamlessly foster collaboration provide a new hotbed for the deployment of medical education content.ObjectiveThis work aims to assess the suitability of the Second Life MUVE as a virtual patient deployment platform for undergraduate dental education, and to explore the requirements and specifications needed to meaningfully repurpose Web-based virtual patients in MUVEs.MethodsThrough the scripting capabilities and available art assets in Second Life, we repurposed an existing Web-based periodontology virtual patient into Second Life. Through a series of point-and-click interactions and multiple-choice queries, the user experienced a specific periodontology case and was asked to provide the optimal responses for each of the challenges of the case. A focus group of 9 undergraduate dentistry students experienced both the Web-based and the Second Life version of this virtual patient. The group convened 3 times and discussed relevant issues such as the group’s computer literacy, the assessment of Second Life as a virtual patient deployment platform, and compared the Web-based and MUVE-deployed virtual patients.ResultsA comparison between the Web-based and the Second Life virtual patient revealed the inherent advantages of the more experiential and immersive Second Life virtual environment. However, several challenges for the successful repurposing of virtual patients from the Web to the MUVE were identified. The identified challenges for repurposing of Web virtual patients to the MUVE platform from the focus group study were (1) increased case complexity to facilitate the user’s gaming preconception in a MUVE, (2) necessity to decrease textual narration and provide the pertinent information in a more immersive sensory way, and (3) requirement to allow the user to actuate the solutions of problems instead of describing them through narration.ConclusionsFor a successful systematic repurposing effort of virtual patients to MUVEs such as Second Life, the best practices of experiential and immersive game design should be organically incorporated in the repurposing workflow (automated or not). These findings are pivotal in an era in which open educational content is transferred to and shared among users, learners, and educators of various open repositories/environments.

Game‐Based Learning in Virtual Worlds: A Multiuser Online Game for Medical Undergraduate Radiology Education within Second Life

“…Finally, another limitation of League of Rays was the time invested, either to create the content or to drive the game correctly, which is a common limitation reported in Second Life learning projects (Baker, ; Gong, ). However, the repurposing of content for future editions of the game or other projects can reduce this limitation (Antoniou et al, ).…”

“…Second Life (), launched by Linden Research, Inc. (San Francisco, CA) in 2003, is considered the most popular and active virtual world in higher education (Baker et al, ; Warburton, ; Gong, ; Potkonjak et al, ) and the most used virtual world platform for health education (Liaw et al, ). Second Life educational capabilities have been used for patient health education (Zielke et al, ; Rosal et al, ; Brewer et al, ; Weiner et al, ) and for online learning of diverse health professionals (Papadopoulos et al, ; Antoniou et al, ; Miller and Jensen, ; Irwin and Coutts, ; Shaffer et al, ; Mauldin Pereira et al, ), including postgraduate (Wielcha et al, ; Schwaab et al, ; Melús‐Palazón et al, ) and undergraduate (Richardson et al, ; Creutzfeld et al, ; Gazave and Hatcher, ) medical users. Learning platforms developed in Second Life for health undergraduate students utilize diverse approaches, such as case‐based learning (Conradi et al, ), team‐based learning (Richardson‐Hatcher et al, ; Gazave and Hatcher, ), clinical learning environments for developing clinical reasoning skills (Mauldin Pereira et al, ), and 3D design of anatomical models based on the building capabilities of Second Life (Richardson‐Hatcher et al, ).…”

OSCase: Data Schemes, Architecture and Implementation details of Virtual Patient repurposing in Multi User Virtual Environments.

“…There are, furthermore, even more specialized simulation environments such as a transfusion operation simulator [41], or a human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemic simulator [42] as well as other hazardous or highly impactful real life situations [43], [44]. Even in a rather narrow and specific healthcare field such as dentistry there have been some activity ( [45]- [49]) but with the bulk of the activity turned towards proprietary custom virtual reality simulators ( [50]- [53]). Due to its highly collaborative nature and the ease of content creation in these platforms, nursing training has a strong presence in them.…”

“…There are several studies and reviews regarding nursing education ([54]- [59]), ranging from generic journal clubs [60], honing interpersonal interview skills [61] and decision-making capabilities [62], to specifics like mental health nursing [63], moving all the way to meta-education, such as faculty education about nursing teaching methods [64]. With this being only a very high level overview of the material available on these platforms and a couple of very comprehensive cataloguing efforts [18] [49] we present here a further automation of this presentation method. First we present as it has been achieved, the separation of the narrative from the virtual environment and its consumption from the web using static web page tree as a proof of application approach.…”

The benefits and barriers of using virtual worlds to engage healthcare professionals on distance learning programmes

“…These could be realistic, such as a virtual laboratory (Cashmore, Cane, & Lavelle, 2013) or pseudo-realistic, such as the ability to dissect a 3D frog (Lucas, 2011) or explore electronic circuits (Callaghan, McCusker, Losada, Harkin, & Wilson, 2013). Other work demonstrates the benefits of developing more flexible learning spaces which can be repurposed for use by other disciplines (Dafli, Vegoudakis, Pappas, & Bamidis, 2010) and to simulate complex clinical environments without endangering patients (Antoniou, Athanasopoulou, Dafli, & Bamidis, 2014).…”