Abstract
Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) are becoming more and more important in many areas because they offer users the opportunity to experiment with novel interaction paradigms in order to perform collaborative work or have engaging experiences ‘being together’. One of the most promising application fields is eLearning, where CVEs give the unique opportunity to explore effective educational formats. Surprisingly, if compared with other more traditional fields as software engineering and database, we note a lack of design approaches. We point out that a well-founded design approach is crucial to develop collaborative experiences that could generate substantial and measurable educational benefits. To meet this challenge, in this paper we present a set of founding concepts that enable pedagogs and teachers designing effective 3D virtual worlds for education. To keep our concepts simply understandable, we based our design method on a widespread metaphor: the theater. We demonstrate through a real case study the promising advantages of our approach: expressiveness to capture collaborative features at a high level of abstraction, semi-formality to facilitate the establishment of a common ground between educational designers and CVEs engineers, and guidance to enable non-experts to cope with all the relevant aspects of a 3D virtual world.
Highlights
Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) are computer-based 3D virtual worlds where users can meet and interact with each other in order to perform effectively collaborative work or have engaging experiences ‘being together’ [1]
The growth of CVEs for education calls for new conceptual tools that enable domain experts and engineers to model and keep under control the design complexity unleashed by innovative 3D virtual worlds, and carefully consider the impact of the design decisions on the optimal flow of the user experience during online sessions
In this paper we proposed a set of founding concepts that enable pedagogs, teachers, and tutors designing effective 3D virtual worlds for education
Summary
Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) are computer-based 3D virtual worlds where users can meet and interact with each other in order to perform effectively collaborative work or have engaging experiences ‘being together’ [1]. Demonstrate that collaborative activities, focused on a cognitive goal and supported by experts, result in the more meaningful and efficient acquisition of knowledge’ Due to their internal complexity and behavior, the design of 3D virtual worlds for education traditionally has been the privilege of engineers. In this paper we present a set of founding concepts that enable pedagogs, teachers, and tutors designing effective 3D virtual worlds for education, and discussing with engineers for implementation. The frequent change of the educational format among the above-mentioned projects gave us the possibility to discuss more and more with educational designers and developers, deriving a map of concepts that links together these different skills; this let us to define a common layer for the conceptual design of CVEs, without requiring specific technical competencies for the designer.
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