CASE STUDY - talkademy's course on German culture and history

This case study describes a course that was developed for the University of Bielefeld and first delivered in spring 2011. It main ideas are to use existing German places in Second Life to immerse students into German culture. It was inspired by simulated biography (as suggested by Uwe Koreik in 1993). A student from Bielefeld wrote her master thesis about the course and did some interesting research on the course and its impact on the participants. [reference]

After it's initial run, it became repeated 2 times until now (with slight modifications).

1. Pre-course preparation

1.1 Decision making process

Basic ideas:

• There are many German places and communities in Second Life that can be used to teach German culture and history, as e.g. Munich (very nicely built, very lively community), Berlin 1920 (great atmosphere, all inhabitants playing a role in Berlin 1920), Cologne.
• What can be found there can be easily tied to general topics and be elaborated in the course: Munich -> Bavarian culture (traditional costumes, traditional dances, buildings, etc.); Berlin ->interwar period, "golden 20ies", etc.
• Developing a biography for oneself is a nice method to deeply dive into a cultural context; furthermore it challanges student's creativity and it is fun.
• Spontanous encounters with real Germans in the virtual world keeps the course exciting - as you never know what happens.
• We used facebook for this course, and it worked out very well - no more Moodle.
• As in our English course, the students get a project  to work on; the rationale behind is the same as in the English course (motivation, creativity, ownership ... )

1.2 Aims/objectives

Beside improving and practicing language, the courses main objective was on hands-on learning of German culture and history. We strongly believe, there is no better way to learn about history than to do the leap in time back ... e.g. to Berlin 1920 :-)

1.3 Funding

 The courses were paid by the university/college that offered it, thus talkademy was hired to deliver the course.

1.4   Environment and the learners

We used Second Life because of the German places that are available there - and we used Facebook, because this is were the students are all the time anyway. In the times of Moodle, we never got student's posts at midnight ...

We created a "DaF"-stage on our island as place for meeting each other, for discussions, games and as exhibition area for the student's projects. From there we started our field trips to other places in SL.

The learners were students from Bielefeld. Most of them studied German.

1.5   Logistics and timetabling

Similar to our English course, the course lasted about 8 sessions - which was a little too short to cover all our ideas and student's project as well. We usually started at the DaF-stage with a little game to introduce the topic (e.g. sorting cubes with pictures on a floor-map, a little quiz-show, etc.).  

At the beginning of the course our focus was more on the project to make sure that the students find their topic and have enough time to develop their ideas during the rest of the course. Both team picked an exhibition as their topic: One team created an exhibition on the "Oktoberfest", the other one on "Made in Germany".

A second smaller project was the development of a biography for Berlin 1920, which were used for roleplays.

1.7   Advertising the course

The course was part of the university's normal course offerings.

2. Course implementation

 2.1 Technical issues and support

As mentioned above, we tried to always have a second person (beside the main teacher) online for helping out with technical issues.

Our experience showed, that during the first 2 sessions technical problems were quite frequent, whereas after the 2nd session they had practically gone.

The most frequent and most critical technical issue is obviously the ability to talk and hear (thus find the talk-button and the volume control).

Other potential technical problems (e.g. loosing students on a fieldtrip) can be easily addressed by appropriate classroom-management: Make sure you have all your students in your friends list and be the last one to teleport away :-)  

2.2 Interaction

The teacher was online all the time and guided the students through the session. Additional interaction partners were the external experts / actors that were invited or other residents of the used places. Offline-interaction mostly happened via facebook (occasionally via eMail).

2.3 Resources

Resources/material were distribiuted via facebook.

2.4 Ethical issues

Bullying is defintly an issue that the students must be prepared to. We use to say, that SecondLife is like the real world: Everything that exists in the real world exists in there as well.

3. Post-course

3.1 Assessment

There was no formal assessment involved in the course.

3.1 Evaluation

We collected student's feedback after each session by using 3 vote-masters (tool in SecondLife where students answer a question by clicking on a corresponding bar) - one vote-master for each part of the session (e.g. game, field-trip, project work). This gave us valuable feedback on

for details, please refer to ... Xin's master thesis"