Virtual Worlds in Education - A systematic Literature Review

Virtual worlds (VWs) are no novum in higher education but regain interest through COVID-19 restrictions, emerging technologies, and the metaverse hype. Therefore, we conduct a systematic literature review to gain the current status quo of research in higher and further education to identify the educational activities, research areas, learning environments, technologies towards the metaverse, subjects taught, and the current state of design knowledge. The initially found 587 records were systematically filtered to 89 fully coded articles. Based on our results, we define research gaps and derive research streams. Our results reveal a lack of research on social integration, course design, non-technical target groups, theoretical grounding and general design knowledge within the given context. The metaverse trend has reached educational research in the way that from 2016 onwards, new technologies are investigated selectively for educational purposes

A virtual world workshop environment for learning agile software development techniques

Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) are the subject of increasing interest for educators and trainers. This article reports on a longitudinal project that seeks to establish a virtual agile software development workshop hosted in the Open Wonderland MUVE, designed to help learners to understand the basic principles of some core agile software development techniques. The authors take a design-based research approach that allows for cycles of learning and reflection that has enabled following an iterative path of development through two major iterations. The authors trace the research path followed from the real world workshop to its virtual incarnation, describing the design philosophy and the constructed virtual artefacts. The authors conclude by reflecting on the insights into learner perceptions and practical implementations gained from building and evaluating the virtual workshop