Pedagogical agents are on-screen characters that help facilitate learning in a virtual or mixed-reality setting. The research on pedagogical agents has shifted focus since their creation, from understanding their underlying principles, identifying their potential roles and usage, and recently finetuning their design for applied practice. This…

As augmented, virtual and mixed reality have become more user-friendly and affordable, these technologies gained increasing interest from education. Teachers all over the world are triggered by the perceived benefits and start experimenting. However, teachers encounter obstacles to pursue effective implementation. This paper describes how these…

As education preparation programs align their instruction to the contemporary technologies used in schools, they may begin to design and deliver virtual reality instruction in the teaching methods classroom. In this study, we examined the experiences of 24 pre-service teachers as they used virtual reality for the first time through the lens of the…

This paper is a report of a cross-cultural online collaboration between two cohorts of pre-service teachers in Hong Kong, China and an American university in St. Paul, Minnesota. It explicates the pedagogical design and implementation of online tools for group collaboration and students' perceptions of the benefits and challenges. Multiple…

Team projects allow students to apply their technical skills to a real-world context and build twenty-first century competencies, including teamwork, project management and communication skills. However, the complex challenges that such experiential learning projects present for students and faculty can limit the scale of implementation. This…

Second Life (SL) has been gaining increased attention in Education since it was launched in 2003. Language educators explored SL mainly as a virtual learning environment where learners can interact with native speakers (e.g., Hislope, 2008; Wang, Song, Xia, & Yan, 2009). Although most studies concluded positively about using SL for language…