V-Learning: How Gaming and Avatars are Engaging Online Students

Abstract

As I watched my 12-year-old nephew play Halo 2 online while strategizing with his friends over his microphone-enabled headset, I realized that his play environment might well be the next distance learning platform. In cooperative online video games like Halo 2, players win by working together to understand and overcome the obstacles set forth in the storyline. Essentially, cooperative learning is occurring in these games. The virtual worlds in which today's video games take place can be reshaped as real-time synchronous virtual classrooms; the advance of technology and increasing accessibility of that technology mean that virtual reality is a viable distance education option. As Net Generation students, already the leading population in online gaming, bring their well-documented learning styles and demands for flexibility and adaptability into higher education venues, the three-dimensional gaming environment remade as a virtual classroom could become the natural next step in online learning (Oblinger 2006). The educational analogue to the three-dimensional gaming world is the virtual learning environment (VLE). The VLE is an online space where learners represent themselves through images called avatars, graphical personifications that represent the learner’s identity, presence, location, and interaction within the VLE. Within this environment, students, represented by their individual avatars, can interact in real time with each other and with computer-based agents, digital artifacts, and virtual contexts. These three-dimensional worlds