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This book has focused on discipline-based uses of virtual worlds to enhance the learner experience in online education, including both fully online and hybrid or blended learning settings. The cases reported yield insight into how practitioner-scholars from across the globe have addressed key needs, problems, and issues that have lent themselves to the use of a virtual world. In particular, authentic learning opportunities that can prepare learners for the workplace feature heavily, as do the notion of "practice" and the engagement of students in reflective and meta-cognitive processes. The chapters are rich with examples of how the distinguishing features and characteristics of virtual worlds identified by Dalgamo and Lee (2010), along with the resulting affordances for spatial, contextual, experiential, and collaborative learning and for fostering motivation and engagement they describe, can be exploited to design effective learning tasks and environments. According to Dalgarno and Lee, 3D virtual environments are unique because of their representational fidelity and the types of user interactivity they support, from which arise the properties of identity construction, sense of presence, and co-presence . Issues and considerations as well as learning benefits associated with these features and properties are seen borne out repeatedly across all of the cases throughout the book. |
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