Does online game-based learning work in formal education at school? A case study of VISOLE


               Online education? Video games? Do they work hand in hand? Can they be one and the same? Many students these days have almost unlimited access to the internet and have dedicated innumerable hours to it. The internet you can say, is an intergral part of society, so why not try and combine education with entertainment? In an study done by Morris S. Y. Jong*, titled, "Does online game-based learning work in formal education at school? A case study of VISOLE," she discusses Game-Based Learning (GBL) and the difference between Education In Games (EIG) and Games In Education (GIE), as well as how VISOLE (Virtual Interactive Student-Oriented Learning Environment) utilizes the many methods of video game learning through study.

                Education in Games is a concept to which a video game simulator or recreational games can be adopted to certain lessons to help further strengthen the understanding of the material or articulate areas needing more complex examples. Some examples included SimEarth for learning ecology, Zoo Tycoon for learning zoology, all stemming from a trial of SimCity being utilized as a learning enhancer. Second Life, a massive multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG), was used to engage college students to participate in a sociocultural study. A similar game, EverQuest II was tried as a enhancer for learning a second language. Unfortunately, EIG was very limited to what can be offered and where it can be utilized, for not every game offered a wide area of adoption to the many different areas of educational instruction.

               Games in Education however, was solely developed based upon their pedagogical propositions and articulated with explicit education content. Distributed Authentic Professionalism, the underlying pedagogical proposition made by Shaffer (2007) was dependent on developing students by offering simulations of various professional communities to which they may inhabit one day. Another example was a proposition made by Lee and Lau (2006) in Problem-Based Folklore Learning games, suggesting that learning takes place in an interactive adventure articulated with a number of problem-solving tasks in a folklore-based story plot. GIE is still a ongoing study and hopes to yield promising results.

               VISOLE, consisting of 3 phases based on the theoretical foundation of scaffolding, reflection, and debriefing. Phase I consists of scaffolding through a number of face-to-face lessons builds with increasing level of difficulty prior to the knowledge of the previous lesson on to the next phasing. Phase II, GBL and reflection deploys an online multi-player interactive game portraying a virtual world in which students play a role to shape its development. Phase II and Phase III crossover with each other. Phase III, debriefing, the teacher observes student progress within Phase II and extracts interesting or problematic scenarios to conduct case-study-based debriefing through a number of face-to-face lessons. Some limitations as discovered in the research study of VISOLE was that the teachers who volunteered were experienced and/or had previous knowledge of GBL, which made the study move more smoothly. However, if a teacher who had no knowledge or understanding of GBL were to implement the same methodology, the results would be different from the study.

              With the rise of online gaming and the inherent adoption of the internet into society, online educational games, the need for and access to GIE classified games should be apparent. With the understanding and the difference of EIG and GIE, and the study done in regards to VISOLE, online educational gaming could see a rise in popularity and quite possibly a requirement for teachers to implement within their lesson planning. I completely agree to the adaptation of educational methods to include online educational gaming as a requirement for students to have.