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Abstracts |
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STUDENTS’ NEEDS AND VIRTUAL WORLDSNikolaos Tapsis and Konstantinos Tsolakidis, University of the Aegean, Greece This paper investigates to what extent Second Life as the main learning environment of a postgraduate program meets students’ needs. The work is part of a research program on the comparative use of the Virtual World (VW) Second Life (SL) as opposed to the Learning Management System (LMS) (BlackBoard Vista) in postgraduate courses (see Tapsis, Efthymiou, & Vitsilakis, 2011, and Tapsis, Tsolakidis, & Vitsilakis, in press). In this paper a qualitative research approach is applied, implementing semi-structured interviews, after the experimental use of Second Life (SL) as a learning environment. The results show that the main reasons for students to accept a VW alternative learning environment are the fast communication, because it is time saving, and the 3D graphical environment, which facilitates their construction of cognitive models.
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