Εναλλακτικές Μορφές Εκπαίδευσης

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to compare the way a three-dimensional virtual environment (3DVE), such as Second Life (SL), as opposed to a two-dimensional virtual environment (2DVE), eg, the BlackBoard Vista, can be used in a distance education program in order to enhance students' learning experience (students' perceived learning, collaboration and satisfaction from the educational process).The distance learning program of the University of the Aegean, titled "Gender and New Educational and Work Environments in the Information Society", constructed the "Island" named RhodesGenderPostgrad in the virtual world SL since 2010. This virtual learning environment has been designed for educational activities (projection of educational material and the support of inter-group, inter-personal and whole class synchronous communication). An educational comparative research design was applied in order to study in which way the particular virtual world could contribute in enhancing virtual education, which is part of the mainstream of education (Chen et al, 2008). Social presence, being considered a key concept of online activities in virtual environments, is associated with the concept "communication medium" (which is the independent variable in this research) and the concepts "interaction", "perceived learning" and "satisfaction" (dependent variables in this research). The main research questions had to do with the eventual different impact that the two technological environments mentioned above had on students' communication, on their perceived learning outcome as well as on their satisfaction from it.In order to answer the research questions, an educational field experiment in the class of the graduate program of the academic year 2010-11 has been applied. The class of students was divided into two groups: the experimental group of SL and the control group of Vista. For three weeks the two groups followed the activities of the course in two different environments. The survey was implemented by using a mixed method involving quantitative and qualitative methods.The results showed that the virtual worlds can (1) enhance a sense of co-presence to the members of the class, (2) facilitate interaction and (3) increase students' satisfaction from the educational process. As this study shows that virtual worlds can support the implementation of collaborative learning models from distance, future studies may go further to a comparison between the two different technological environments' mediation effects on students' collaborative learning in the context of some suitable learning scenarios, especially designed and implemented for this particular purpose.