Since the advent of Second Life in 2004, immersive virtual-reality (VR) environments have been readily available to educators; more recent open-source environments have reduced costs significantly. This study reports on data gathered from an avatar-based immersive experience where teacher-education students gathered in VR spaces for synchronous…

Developers and designers of virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) products are expressing concerns regarding accountability for ethical design and use of VR/AR products in virtual learning environments. Within the field of education, more research is needed to determine how VR/AR designers make decisions regarding ethical issues, and particularly…

The purpose of this study was to ascertain student perceptions of the use and value of three-dimensional virtual environments. A grounded theory approach was used to gather and examine data. Just over half of student participants reported positive experiences. However, most experienced technical difficulties. Despite the technical challenges of…

Within an online science teacher education course, an important although secondary goal was to prepare students for a high-stakes licensure portfolio at some time after course completion. Thus, various communication technologies including synchronous virtual reality meetings and asynchronous student self-created video commentaries were interwoven…

Computer simulations can provide guided practice for a variety of situations that pre-service teachers would not frequently experience during their teacher education studies. Pre-service teachers can use simulations to turn the knowledge they have gained in their coursework into real experience. Teacher simulation training has come a long way over…

Opening with the history, recent advances, and emerging ways to use avatar-based virtual reality, an instructor who has used virtual environments since 2007 shares how these environments bring more options to community building, teaching, and education. With the open-source movement, where the source code for virtual environments was made…

In this article we present a partially realized project for building a distributed learning environment for studying digital circuits Test and Diagnostics at TU-Sofia. We describe the main requirements for this environment, substantiate the developer platform choice, and present our simulation and circuit parameter calculation tools.…

The present article is primarily targeted for the advanced college/university undergraduate students of chemistry/physics education, computational physics/chemistry, and computer science. The most recent software system such as MS Visual Studio .NET version 2010 is employed to perform computer simulations for modeling Bohr's quantum theory of…

Second Life (SL) is a user-created virtual environment with possible merit for teaching and learning in higher education. In this article, two teacher educators reflect on their initial development in SL, considering the ways they worked within SL to meet their differing instructional needs and the ways they prepared students for these learning…

To determine if and how using immersive virtual platforms might further educational purposes, the report examines three graduate, teacher-education, online courses that were conducted in part in Second Life (SL). By studying students' SL-related debriefings and assignments, by considering the type, format, and scheduling of SL events, and by…

The objective of this article is to study the network and virtual reality technologies for developing a virtual dinosaur museum, which provides a Web-learning environment for students of all ages and the general public to know more about dinosaurs. We first investigate the method for building the 3D dynamic models of dinosaurs, and then describe…