How interactive is your virtual world?: examining student engagement on virtual learning activities

This paper is part of our ongoing research on the ways interaction affects student immersion within a virtual world and, consequently, student engagement with the educational activities that take place within it when a hybrid learning method is used. We confirm and further enhance our hypothesis investigating student feelings and thoughts about the interaction taking place within a virtual world when that is used in higher education. Specifically, 111 university students, both at undergraduate and postgraduate level, who used our "in-house" OpenSim virtual world for roughly 8 weeks, were asked to indicate their opinion and feelings about the virtual world and the various kinds of interaction they had. The results of this study validated our initial hypothesis that interaction plays a crucial role in student engagement, underlying that the nature and the design of the educational activities substantially affects student engagement.