A Survey of Students' Experiences on Collaborative Virtual Learning Activities Based on Five-Stage Model.
M. Kemal Karaman, Sevil Orhan Özen · Educational Technology & Society · 2016
Introduction Low cost personal computers, advances in wide band web systems, wireless computing, and sound and video technologies supported virtual reality technology development in the 2000s and show an increase in the number of members using virtual environments or virtual worlds. Therefore, technological advances play a vital role in the spread of virtual worlds, for which many definitions exist in the literature (Andreas, Tsiatsos, Terzidou, Pomportsis, 2010; Cukurbaji, 2012; Yalcinalp, Sen, Kocer & Koroglu, 2012). In a general sense, a virtual-world enables the students to live a series of experiences by means of an avatar in a technological environment, which can potentially trigger authentic learning activities, because it is a representation of the real environment (Crisp, Hillier & Joarder, 2010). In virtual worlds, students can walk, run, teleport or fly from one place to another and they can build, purchase, rent or sell a three-dimensional virtual object or land. In this context, the students can interact with each other and other virtual objects in many virtual worlds such as OpenSim, Active Worlds, Multiverse and There. However, one of the prominent virtual worlds is Second Life (SL) (Kohler, Fueller, Matzler & Stieger, 2011; Kotsilieris & Dimopoulou, 2014). It is known amongst many users as the most developed social virtual world platform, and has become the subject of many studies (Crisp, Hillier & Joarder, 2010; Qukurbaji, 2012; Wang & Burton, 2013; Yalcinalp et al., 2012). In fact, many universities or educational institutions such as Texas State, Sheffield, Middle East Technical and Istanbul Universities have built education islands under the name of virtual campus in SL and have carried out education activities. SL provides very strong group communication tools for students in order to establish social networks and groups (Kohler, et al., 2011). The students can assign roles within the group using avatars, and can also use multi-communication channels for laughing, dancing and applauding. Those who are in a different position geographically can send immediate messages (IM) to a group orally or in writing in order to receive assistance from other online students. The students in SL are able to take a role actively, rather than passively (Andreas et al., 2010). Another benefit of SL is that the barriers between the students and tutors are broken down with the use of SL. This is because the students interact with tutors and other students in SL more comfortably while collaborating during group activities (Hawkridge & Wheeler, 2010). For example, recently, the use of 3D worlds has allowed distance tutors to create activities in which students can collaboratively learn concepts by playing different roles (Bravo & Garcia-Magarino, 2015). SL allows tutors to create collaborative learning environments (Loureiro & Bettencourt, 2014; Sutcliffe & Alrayes, 2012) because it contains many collaborative learning tools. The tutors can develop a SL environment by supporting collaborative learning and organize discussion groups and virtual conferences by using these tools (Qukurbaji, 2012; Loureiro & Bettencourt, 2014). In collaborative learning activities, the students share a common goal, depend on each other and are mutually responsible for their successes or failures (Mavridis, Konstantinidis & Tsiatsos, 2012). However, it is not a straightforward process to perform learning activities in collaborative virtual learning (CVL) environment. It is a highly complex process, especially when there is a lack of appropriate methodologies (Bravo & Garcia-Magarino, 2015). Thus, the tutors need a methodology or a model to conduct CVL activities in the common framework. In this study, we used a development model to plan CVL activities in SL. The need for a model Literature offers various models of online learning and teaching for development (Burgess, Slate, Rojas-LeBouef & LaPrairie, 2010; Puzziferro & Shelton, 2014). …