The impact of student engagement in a 3D virtual world on course outcomes

The traditional (seated) education offers the opportunity for a face-to-face (F2F) interaction among students and their instructors. However, this F2F interaction is typically absent in online education since the participants are separated by time and space. The three dimensional (3D) virtual world (VW) offers an opportunity to enhance interaction among students and their instructors by allowing their agents or avatars to meet F2F in a 3D VW so this should somewhat compensate for the lack of a physical F2F interaction. The purpose of this project was to utilize a 3D VW technology to engage students in online (OL) courses to enhance their learning and performance. We present several different types of 3D VW platforms and utilize Second Life (SL) by Linden Lab in this study. This paper presents the lead author’s experience in utilizing SL to enhance students’ learning at two different campuses. The lead author utilized SL and Blackboard Course Management System (CMS) to enhance two online marketing courses in summer 2010 at a public southeastern university in the USA. During the following years, this co-author/instructor utilized SL and Moodle CMS at a private southeastern university in the USA to enhance students’ learning.