Maggi Savin-Baden, Coventry University

Paper Session 3, Harlington Suite, 3:15 - 4:15 pm

Title: The impact of learning in immersive virtual worlds on the nature of pedagogical relationships

Keywords: virtual worlds, learning, pedagogy

Learning in immersive virtual worlds (simulations and virtual worlds such as Second Life) has become a central learning approach in many curricula. Most research to date has been undertaken into students' experiences of virtual learning environments, discussion forums and perspectives about what and how online learning has been implemented. Immersive virtual worlds offer different textualities that are increasingly ushering in new issues such as temporality and spatiality becoming not just contested but dynamic and intersected by one another.

This paper suggests that there is a lack of pedagogical underpinning relating to the use of virtual worlds in higher education, for example there are currently few research papers that suggest why such worlds are being used or adopting social forms models of education which would seem at better fir than the current behaviour models that largely operate across most of the global higher education system. The paper presents a project (Problem-based Learning in Virtual Interactive Educational Worlds (PREVIEW) that sought to combine pedagogy with technology, which has been tested in health, medicine in social care and is over the next few months being tested in education, physiotherapy and psychology. It is argued the current lack of pedagogical underpinning has introduce a number of difficulties which might be overcome by using approaches that readily combine pedagogy with technology

This paper will present a pedagogical approach for developing scenarios for learning in immersive worlds. Four avatar driven and four information driven problem-based scenarios were developed and tested with students and their feedback was used to develop and improve them. Two avatar driven scenarios will be presented and critiqued in this presentation It will be argued that developing open source pedagogically driven learning scenarios may offer a new liquidity to learning which combines technology with pedagogy in ways that are mutually beneficial.