Architectural propositions for enhancement of learning spaces within 3D Virtual Learning Environments

Newly emergent 3D Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), e.g. Second Life, are increasingly being utilised by many educational institutions and universities to deliver e-learning. This necessitates erection of virtual campuses to accommodate classes and sessions conducted within these worlds. However, sparse research exists that explores users’ satisfaction from buildings used within these 3DVLEs. Furthermore, no research exists that discusses contentment levels of users specifically towards 3D educational facilities, or users’ preferences and requirements from buildings’ different constructional and architectural design elements. This research investigates the presence of such impact of architectural features of 3D virtual educational buildings and classrooms on users’ comfort within them, by recording, analyzing and categorising higher education students’ and staff’s design preferences and propositions to enhance virtual campus’ learning spaces, internally and externally. This has potential to boost e-learning experiences within 3DVLEs analogous to the positive effect of physical real-life architecture on students’ learning within their respective classrooms

Using data mining for assessing students interaction with social media in higher education: the case of using learning analytics within the curriculum

The role of social media in higher education has shifted from providing a web 2.0 solution for supporting communication in computer supported learning to more advanced functionalities including virtual learning environment tools (e.g. content sharing, threaded discussions). This paper discusses how analysis of social media usage can equip tutors with visual probes to identify areas that may need attention. The paper also describes how data mining can be used to assess communication patterns in computer supported collaborative learning (e.g. issues associated with content, learning activities or student competencies). The data collected from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have been analysed using various statistical techniques to identify group cohesion, communication pattern, student interactions with and use of the different types of social media. Current work presented in the paper includes the statistical analysis of data communication between small student groups or student pairs from a cohort of more than 200 final year students studying information systems, over a two-year period. The scope of the analysis was to assess how different learning tasks affected individual and group contributions as well as the impact of specific learning activities on tasks such as commenting, sharing, linking and liking. The investigation also considered how keywords were used, indicating how social media interaction was affected by the subjects covered during specific learning weeks. Building on previous work by the authors, this paper tests metrics identified previously for use in a learning analytics dashboard. The data includes attributes, which identify students’ usage of social media such as total tweets, Facebook posts and LinkedIn projects, submitted by students over a period of 24 learning weeks over 7-8 months, during the two academic years 2014-15 and 2015-16. Data mining techniques are used to investigate whether metric, identified before, are useful in predicting student’s results in terms of engagement, involvement, participation, contribution and communication. These are some of the factors that may affect the learning experience when integrating Web 2.0 technologies with traditional virtual learning environments. Current work also discussed the design of learning dashboards, to identify student’s results in real time (i.e. identifying those students who are likely to fail or need additional support), as ways to implement learning analytics in the curriculum

Investigating the educational value of social learning networks: a quantitative analysis

The emergence of Education 2.0 enabled technology-enhanced learning, necessitating new pedagogical approaches, while e-learning has evolved into an instrumental pedagogy of collaboration through affordances of social media. Social learning networks and ubiquitous learning enabled individual and group learning through social engagement and social distribution of knowledge. Nevertheless, these developments have not been supported with extensive studies focusing on quantifying the impact of technology-enhanced learning on students’ progress and achievement. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how a quantitative overview of Facebook’s influence on students’ progress can be incorporated in a proposed e-moderation model of teaching and learning. Design/methodology/approach The approach is based on extending Salmon’s (2003) e-moderation model, which provides an emphasis on the theoretical perspectives that support socially situated learning environments of social networks such as Facebook. The findings revealed that students’ grades were positively influenced by the complementary use of Facebook on their courses of study. Findings The use of a social learning network also triggered a significant increase in student participation in learning activities delivered over Facebook. Research limitations/implications The main research limitations were due to the fact that a single social network was chosen for conducting the experiments. Furthermore, the investigation was narrowed down to a selected range of sessions offered to college and university students as part of their course. Originality/value The paper’s contribution is twofold, as it offers an original set of guidelines for conducting social learning network experiments and provides valuable quantifiable findings on the educational value of such networks

Pedagogical immigration to 3D virtual worlds: a critical review of underlying themes and their concepts

A contentious issue has been in debate for the past decade, over the extent of dependency of current generations of students on information and communication technology (ICT) for education. Despite this controversy, there is a generalisation amongst researchers that fundamental shifting of educational methods towards e-learning is deemed inevitable and beneficial to cater for emerging students’ skills and preferences. One of these newly emergent e-learning platforms is 3D Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) like Second Life. To the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to derive and critically analyse, using grounded theory, advantageous and disadvantageous themes and their sub concepts of providing e-learning through 3DVLEs