Factors Affecting Learner Collaboration in 3D Virtual Worlds

Introduction

Designed for collaboration, 3D virtual worlds (3D VWs) have been gaining popularity because of their resemblance to real-world contexts, which may inspire learners to interact as they would in real life (Cooke-Plagwirz, 2008, p. 549). 3D VWs, such as Second Life, are multi-modal immersive web-conferencing environments that provide users with a simulation of real-life experiences by embodying the user in graphical form, referred to as an avatar (Gerhard, Moore, & Hobbs, 2004), and immersing them in worlds resembling real-life locations (Peterson, 2011). These environments are conceptually different from face-to-face and other web-conferencing contexts in that they take learners outside of traditional learning spaces and immerse them in a simulated real-life context (Author & Priven, 2015). In 3D VWs “people experience others as being there with them and where they interact with them” (Schroeder, 2008, p. 2); thus, such environments can engage learners in learning experiences different from those they may have other learning contexts. Because learners can experience 3D worlds alongside other learners utilizing audio- and text-based communication channels, they can learn through “experiential problem solving and complex and spatially distributed forms of collaboration” (Cornille, Thorne, & Desmet, 2012, p. 245).

Learner collaboration in 3D VWs has been the main focus of many of the studies examining these types of environments (e.g., Dalton & Devitt, 2016; Jauregi, Canto, de Graaff, & Moonen, 2010; Lan, 2014; Lan, Kan, Sung, & Chan, 2016; Peterson, 2006, 2010; Toyoda & Harrison, 2002). In particular, studies that explore the relationship between task type and learner collaboration have found that reasoning-gap, problem-solving, and decision-making tasks provide learners with more opportunities for collaborative learning than information-gap and jig-saw tasks (Lan, 2014; Lan, Kan, Sung, & Chung, 2016; Peterson, 2006). Learner collaboration is also facilitated by the incorporation of environment exploration into task design, which encourages learners to explore the environment and share their observations with other group members (Jauregi, Canto, de Graaff, & Moonen, 2010; Kozola, 2018; ; Lan, Kan, Sung, & Chung, 2016).

Jauregi et al. (2010) found that learners’ interactional patterns in tasks with an environment exploration component were different from those than in tasks with information and opinion exchange components. When exploring the environment, participants usually do not talk, and so the interactional patterns were characterized by long stretches of silence. In information and opinion exchange tasks, however, Jauregi et al. found that the interactional patterns featured “a dynamic verbal turn-taking exchange among participants, with almost no space for silences” (p. 86). Another study, Peterson (2010), similarly investigated learners’ participation patterns in collaborative interaction during open-ended, opinion-exchange, and giving-presentation tasks. Peterson reported a high level of task-focused student interaction in all three of the tasks, attributing these results to the task type as well as to the “highly learner centered nature of the interaction” (p. 289).