Cyber-Learning in Cyberworlds (original) (raw)

Virtual worlds: Further development of web-based teaching

Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on Education, Honolulu, HI, 2005

Significant components of the Instructional Technology Program at Appalachian State University have been moved into a 3D virtual world web environment. These include whole courses, course experiences and various student and faculty interactions. Virtual worlds provide opportunities to add elements of space, movement and physical presence, along with dimensional artifacts and metaphors not found in more traditional web-based counterparts. Students enter the 3D world from a desktop computer. Just as watching a ...

Virtual and Real Geometry Learning Environments

Over the last years a lot of web-based courses in all disciplines had been developed and different kind of distance and e-learning had been introduced. There was an over assessment of e-learning possibilities like web-based learning. Still a face to face interaction between teacher and student has remained indispensable. The poor student/professor ratio of 200:1 in the lectures of de- scriptive geometry for students of architecture, civil engineering and education in building tech- niques at our university asks for an additional tutoring system. Therefore we introduced in the De- scriptive Geometry course in winter semester 2007/2008 the "Blackboard Learning System CE" through the Virtual Campus Rhineland-Palatinate as an e-tutoring tool. E-learning information and communication tools meet the students in their everyday habits. In this system we take advantage of multimedia technologies for communicating, sparking the interest of the students in geometry and supporting the...

Uses of the Virtual World for Educational purposes

Virtual worlds (VWs) provide sensory immersive experience, exploratory hands-on learning, collaborative social interaction, experiential learn-led activities and active role-play that go beyond the traditional classroom setting. Therefore these immersive environments and applications are very important tools in modern education practices. This paper focuses on the uses of virtual worlds and gamification strategies in the field of education. VWs provide excellent opportunities for an effective distance and online education through the support of groups or communities bringing together subject domain experts, teachers and students from different countries or locations. Consequently, the development of new collaborative e-learning approaches is facilitated. The article presents educational models and gamification strategies developed and tested during the activities carried out in two successful international projects. Some piloting results, lessons learnt, generalizations and conclusions for improvement the v-Learning effectiveness are described and analyzed in the last section.

Using Virtual Worlds in distance learning environments

Conference on Frontiers in Education, 2011

This paper presents two tools developed to facilitate the use and automate the process of using Virtual Worlds for educational purposes. The first tool has been developed to automatically create the classroom space, usually called region in the virtual world, which means, a region in the virtual world used to develop educational activities between professors, students and interactive objects. The