Digital Exhibition Space - A 3D Virtual Platform to Support Socialised Learning

Abstract

The teaching and learning challenges that Higher Education has faced over the last 18 months have highlighted the need for future learning environments to operate fluidly across both in-class and online settings, to take account of possible disruption and to allow students greater autonomy over how and when they learn. They have also emphasized the value of socialised learning environments, as students learn more effectively and are better able to cope with changes if they are within an active community of learners. The Digital Exhibition Space (DES), is a new virtual learning platform within which students learn by working collaboratively to curate and present an exhibition of their coursework. DES has been purposefully designed to support the blended learning process and to work flexibly across classroom and online settings. It enables both teachers and students to visualize individual and whole-class progress, to give progressive feedback, to facilitate synchronous and asynchronous interaction, knowledge exchange, and peer regulation. DES has been applied in several university and secondary school courses in Hong Kong. Three of these are introduced in this presentation to demonstrate the capacity of DES in supporting socialized learning and its great potential for both online, hybrid or blended contexts. Qualitative data was collected from semi-structured interviews with teachers and students, through content analysis, the results indicate that DES has intrinsically motivated students in three perspectives: to learn, to accomplish and to experience.