Introduction to Second Life® As a Virtual Training Environment: Perception of University Teachers

In January 2020, two three-hour workshops on an introduction to Second Life® as an online educational platform were held inside a virtual world. The workshops were dedicated to medical university teachers with the main objective being to let them get to know Second Life® and its formative possibilities. The format of this experience was well received by the participants. Everyone who answered the questionnaire agreed that the environment was useful and interesting and that they would repeat a similar experience again. Ten out of 23 participants (43.5%) declared that they were willing to carry out a teaching activity in Second Life®. This kind of action allows for the promotion of other future in-world actions directed to the training of trainers.


Introduction
Second Life ® is one of the most well-known multiuser virtual worlds for higher education [1,2]. Since 2011, different teaching activities have been developed in the Medical Master Island, a place inside Second Life ® dedicated to medical education [3,4] that, by the end of 2019, involved more than 1800 undergraduate and postgraduate students. In parallel to the Second Life ® teaching expansion among medical students [5][6][7], it is also important to promote the knowledge of Second Life ® among other medical teachers. The objective of this study was to evaluate the perceptions of medical teachers about Second Life ® after an introductory session to the 3D virtual world and its educational possibilities in medicine.

Materials and Methods
Two three-hour-length sessions were held in The Medical Master Island on January 23rd and 30th 2020. The sessions consisted of: (1) a basic training in the main functions of the avatar (walking, flying, speaking, listening, chatting, sending note cards and controlling the settings to see the virtual world); (2) a guided visit to the island and its facilities;  Attendees were asked to send a notecard to the organizer at the beginning of the session, evaluating the cognitive load involved in handling Second Life, using the 9-point cognitive load scale, developed by Paas and van Merriënboer [8] and explaining in brief their first impressions about the experience. After the session, they were asked for a second notecard with four 1-to 5-point Likert scale questions about their perception of Second Life and their willingness to participate in the 3D world as teachers, with a space for "any additional comments" in open format.

Results
Twenty-three teachers from seven different universities (Málaga, Córdoba, Granada, Sevilla, Autónoma of Barcelona, Salamanca and La Coruña) participated in the workshops. All were mainly Radiology and Physical Medicine teachers (16), although teachers from other knowledge areas, such as Anatomy (1), Pathological Anatomy (1), Biochemistry (1), Pharmacology (2), Otorhinolaryngology (1) and Pediatrics (1) also participated. Regarding cognitive load, on a scale of 1 to 9, one participant indicated that administering Second Life ® implied a very, very high mental effort (9 points), eight indicated somewhat high effort (6 points), three indicated neutral effort (5 points), five indicated low or very low effort (2-3 points) and the remaining six did not answer that question. The answers to the questions about Second Life ® in a 1-5-point Likert scale are shown in Table 1.

Questions
Likert Scale Values 1 1 2 3 4 5 NA Did you find the workshop interesting? ---2 12 9 Do you think Second Life ® is useful for teaching? ---4 10 9 Would you be interested in participating in future meetings for teachers?

Discussion
The format of this experience was well received by the participants. Everyone who answered the questionnaire agreed that the environment was useful and interesting and that they would repeat similar experiences again. Ten out of 23 participants (43.5%) declared that they were willing to carry out a teaching activity in Second Life ® .
The workshop provided a first contact with Second Life ® and its formative possibilities to medical teachers who attended. As it is designed, it is a 3-h activity, so it is easy to include into university teachers' and specialist doctors' busy schedule. Although the situation supervened by the Covid-19 home confinement limited the available time to organize new similar workshops (mainly because of the increase in clinical workload), in the future we intend to spread the educational potential of Second Life ® among a greater number of teachers of medicine and other health-related sciences. This kind of action allow promote other future in-world actions directed to training of trainers: (i) fostering collaborative work in the Second Life ® virtual world; (ii) familiarizing teachers with the educational possibilities of virtual worlds and the basic technology applicable to them; (iii) sharing teaching experiences carried out in Second Life ® to achieve new interdisciplinary collaborative projects; (iv) using Second Life ® as a means of meeting, gathering and having virtual debates; (v) promoting the development of multidisciplinary and inter-university collaborative educational projects.

Materials:
The workshop program brochure is available online at http://www.biznaga.org/Programa-IntroSL1.pdf, and the basic guide to Second Life is available online at http://www.biznaga.org/guia-basica-secondlife.pdf.