Development and evaluation of a virtual campus on Second Life: The case of SecondDMI

Video games and new communication metaphors are quickly changing today's young people habits. Considering the actual e-learning scenarios, embedded in a fully technological enabled environment it is crucial to take advantage of this kind of capabilities to let learning process gain best results. This paper presents a virtual campus created using Second Life which provides four distinct types of virtual space: common student campus, collaborative zones, lecture rooms and recreational areas. Second Life environments and objects have been designed and programmed to support synchronous lectures and collaborative learning. The Second Life virtual world has also been equipped with supporting tools enabling students and teachers to navigate among multimedia contents. Second Life and an ad-hoc developed Moodle plug-in have been integrated to naturally enrich the environment with LMS services, exploiting this 3D world to increase the interaction and communication opportunities between teachers and students, and among students, principally favoring planned and unplanned social encounters. We have conducted an experiment involving university students aiming at evaluating Second Life synchronous distance lectures in the proposed learning environment. The evaluation has been conducted considering that, in a 3D multi-user virtual environment, learning is strongly related to the user perception of belonging to a learning community, as well as to the perception of awareness, presence and communication. The results of the evaluation are very positive. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.