Virtual worlds in Australian and New Zealand higher education: Remembering the past, Understanding the present and imagining the future

3D virtual reality, including the current generation of multi-user virtual worlds, has had a long history of use in education and training, and it experienced a surge of renewed interest with the advent of Second Life in 2003. What followed shortly after were several years marked by considerable hype around the use of virtual worlds for teaching, learning and research in higher education. For the moment, uptake of the technology seems to have plateaued, with academics either maintaining the status quo and continuing to use virtual worlds as they have previously done or choosing to opt out altogether. This paper presents a brief review of the use of virtual worlds in the Australian and New Zealand higher education sector in the past and reports on its use in the sector at the present time, based on input from members of the Australian and New Zealand Virtual Worlds Working Group. It then adopts a forward-looking perspective amid the current climate of uncertainty, musing on future directions and offering suggestions for potential new applications in light of recent technological developments and innovations in the area

Virtual worlds in Australian and New Zealand higher education: Remembering the past, understanding the present and imagining the future

3D virtual reality, including the current generation of multi-user virtual worlds, has had a long history of use in education and training, and it experienced a surge of renewed interest with the advent of Second Life in 2003. What followed shortly after were several years marked by considerable hype around the use of virtual worlds for teaching, learning and research in higher education. For the moment, uptake of the technology seems to have plateaued, with academics either maintaining the status quo and continuing to use virtual worlds as they have previously done or choosing to opt out altogether. This paper presents a brief review of the use of virtual worlds in the Australian and New Zealand higher education sector in the past and reports on its use in the sector at the present time, based on input from members of the Australian and New Zealand Virtual Worlds Working Group. It then adopts a forward-looking perspective amid the current climate of uncertainty, musing on future directions and offering suggestions for potential new applications in light of recent technological developments and innovations in the area. © 2013 Sue Gregory

Self-guided exploration of virtual learning spaces

Virtual learning spaces provide the opportunity to create authentic, immersive and high-fidelity experiences for learners; often enhanced with new technology to increase the interaction and perception with the learning space. Instead of creating mock-ups in classrooms, educators are able to recreate a controlled replica of the real world, i.e. scenarios and situations can be created that are difficult or impossible to achieve otherwise. However, an unrestricted and unsupervised exploration imposes challenges to monitor the learner, offer supportive guidance and provide formative feedback. Preliminary studies demonstrated that different approaches are able to engage the learner, create an intrinsic motivation and therefore provide curiosity to drive the self-paced learning; yet the use-case-based exploration is not transferred to a framework including a comprehensive tool for education. In this chapter, we demonstrate the prototype of the nDiVE framework, which combines authentic education, gamification, emerging technology and design principles used in the game industry to create an engaging learning space for students and workers