The future of online learning - The virtual learning environments

Reading and reviewing several essays and articles concerning the Second Life as a learning environment, me and Marko (my faculty colleague) came across several authors that had really different positions about the use of Second Life in education purposes. I’m convinced that virtual 3-dimensional learning environments are a future of online learning and teaching, so I want to present you the point of view of Alexandra Petrakou from the School of Communication and Design – University of Kalmar, Sweden. She has different point of view that I do, and she explained it in an article – “Interacting through avatars: Virtual worlds as a context for online education”.

There she begins with an explanation that online education is gradually becoming a viable alternative to traditional campus education due to the rapid development of information technology. She confirms that with the fact that the number of students enrolling in the online courses is increasing and many universities are, in fact, trying to develop e-learning systems. (Petrakou 2010, 1020) The most important fact that she highlights is that the learning environment is not only restricted to the virtual campus, but includes a diversity of activities, experiences and interactions that are a part of the virtual world that exist outside the virtual campus area. At this point she cites Lombardi and McCahill who stated that the real world university campus is a much broader social space that reaches outside the classroom and that learning takes place in the common university areas where learners may have less structured, but equally valuable, opportunity to interact with others – interaction in the virtual world can be just as valuable. (Petrakou 2010, 1026)

She is therefore convinced that the key element of collaboration certainly is social interaction, but at the same time we have to be aware that if there is no social interaction there is also no real collaboration. In addition to this, the virtual world increases the probability that social interaction between students occurs, which in turn my foster collaborative learning. (Petrakou 2010, 1026) At this point I have to say, that the asynchronous interaction is also very important - because allows to stay connected in between the sessions and facilitates critical thinking since students have the opportunity to reflect on and revise their work (Barab et al. in Petrakou 2010, 1026).

As Petrakou concluded in her study, using a virtual world as a context of online education has both advantages and its drawbacks. As explained before, the virtual world provides enhanced interactivity because it allows synchronous communication in combination with spatial dimension, plus includes a diversity of activities, experience and interactions (and not only the virtual campus). But nevertheless she is convinced that the virtual world is currently not adequate as a learning environment on its own. There should be constructed an additional information space in order to gather all information regarding the course and to display this information outside the rather distracting, graphically rich and socially dynamic virtual environment. She also highlights the need to support asynchronous interactivity, which during her study course, was not embedded in the virtual world. (Petrakou 2010, 1027)

At this point I want to conclude, that I'm still convinced that the virtual learning environments are one step ahead the classical online collaboratories - they do not give the opportunity to interact with others outside the learning area, and the students or collaborators are not aware of the presence of the other - they can see their names listed but they do not see what if they are active for sure.

Petrakou, Alexandra. 2010. "Computers & Education Interacting through avatars : Virtual worlds as a context for online education." Computers & Education 54(4): 1020-1027. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2009.10.007.