Exploring the use of virtual environment for international creative education (art & design)

Abstract

Creative industries including education industry seek to utilize knowledge and information for generating a new approach. Literature provides for current potential of virtual worlds as an effective learning environment through connectivity, interactivity, and access to user-generated content. However, up to date, limited effort has been made on the use of virtual environment for international creative education (art and design), which is this paper focused on. In order to explore the possibility of exploiting the virtual environment to achieve meaningful learning of creativity, and provide insights of the current practice and the possibility of adopting the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) in creative education (art & design), with a particular focus in art and design education, for the future investigation in this topic. A number of experiment cases have been conducted in VLE. 3D replica virtual art and design Studio/Gallery/Exhibition can facilitate students to explore the VLE as they would in reality accomplishing what is hard to achieve in a real-life studio while feeling engaged regardless different real-life geographic locations. In addition, intensive interactive features were implemented in the VLE for creative education, such as Portfolio Voting Box, Portfolio Presentation Board, Artwork Questionnaire, Interactive Architecture, and Time Event. The interactive features enable the learner-centered education and problem-solving process to be conducted, which can assist students to actively lead learning process for entertaining, experience sharing, and obtaining better understanding of the art and design concepts and skills associated with their learning experience. Further, by participating the project-oriented and problem-based collaborative design workshop in VLE, students can collaboratively design and cocreate artwork to attain better learning outcomes by collaborating, being, building, and expressing in the way that may not be possible in reality.