A virtual place
learning environment

Steve Clark and Mary Lou Maher
Faculty of Architecture

A critical aspect of any Architecture curriculum is the design studio. The design studio is a place for students and design teachers to come together in a learning context or place. We have since extended this notion of place and established a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). Developing a VLE or virtual place for the design studio means that learning is not bounded by the limitations of physical studio space but is open to collaboration and possibility.

Using an immersive 3D Virtual World based on Active Worlds, we created a virtual studio for students in DESC9123 Website Design. The studio has two distinct parts: a classroom-like place and student galleries. Students can navigate and communicate (synchronous chat) within the environment in the form of an avatar (virtual person) as shown in Figure 1. They can construct and display their knowledge and learning experience using contextual learning resources and tutorials in the 3D virtual classroom environment. The student galleries provide a place for the visual representation of students' own design work which is submitted for peer review and collaborative feedback.

The curriculum design is informed by the literature on student-centred learning, in particular, three key elements - constructivist learning theory, technology and design. The combination of design and learning makes pedagogy central to the learning environment and this has meant that we have needed to think educationally about the importance of context and experience. In fact, the place is designed specifically for context. For example, the virtual place is a gallery of student work. Students add to the gallery with their own exhibitions. The place is designed explicitly to support the construction of knowledge, where students have the ability and are expected to contribute to the place. For us, developing a sense of place, enables students to construct a context that can help them understand their own learning.

Anne Forster's discussion paper raises a key issue about the opportunity to design teaching and learning that enables guided interaction between learners and their engagement with learning resources. These two activities are critical for design students, who often work under the mentorship of an academic to develop their skills and knowledge.

Our reflections on the VLE suggests that the studio gallery acts as a nexus for students - they engage in discussion and collaboration with their peers while viewing each others’ website designs. The key feature that distinguishes this from a traditional chat room is that the students share a common visualisation of the learning materials that constitute their own work. The use of the virtual world intrinsically supports the collaborative and conversational approach to learning since students are able to immediately see who else is in the studio/galleries and can converse with them using a talking by typing approach. Our experience of this type of virtual learning is that students communicate and share thoughts and ideas openly and freely. In a traditional design studio environment, students can often be more reticent about openly expressing their opinions on each other's designs.

What improvements do we envisage? Many students have suggested that we include a face-to-face component to the website design course. This is often due to a perception that online lectures are being taken up by an extensive amount of conversation revolving around student questions and problems, and thereby distracting from the focus of the main topic. Monitoring student conversation in the virtual world is a key problem. There is a constant need to balance unit learning outcomes with what students see as relevant to their learning. To address students' frustration, we have introduced a series of staggered face-to-face lectures at key milestones during the semester. The results have been positive and we are still working on the balance between the real world and virtual world teaching and learning experience.

Visit the Virtual Learning Environment website

Figure 1. Students communicating and collaborating on a web page design.

Steve Clark is a part-time lecturer of Design Science and Digital Media in the Faculty of Architecture and a full-time PhD student with the Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition. His research focuses on Virtual Learning Places that encourage collaboration and constructivism.
Email: stevec@arch.usyd.edu.au

Mary Lou Maher is the Professor of Design Computing in the Faculty of Architecture. Her research includes the use of intelligent virtual environments for collaborative design.
Email: mary@arch.usyd.edu.au