There has been a growing interest and awareness in using online technologies to support teaching and learning activities within higher education. While the Covid 19 pandemic, and the subsequent shut down of society, offers one explanation for this growing interest among educators, this increasing interest could also be an outcome of the proliferation of education technologies now available. Online video conference systems have become popular tools for organising both online synchronous teaching as well as hybrid teaching activities. Video conference systems designed for education share some common features and prerequisites for mediating interactions between participants—besides the webcam and microphone, these systems can offer built in support for text chat, whiteboards, and breakout rooms and include awareness and turn-taking functions such as raised hands, emojis, polls, etc. Nevertheless, it is the video and sound that offers the main media for interactions.

Unlike traditional physical teaching on campus, interactions in a video-based teaching situation are characterised by being two-dimensional (2D). Both teachers and students are represented flat on a computer screen where everyone appears as equal regardless of their role. In this context, students do not have options to choose seats in the back but are always placed in the “front row”. On the one hand, it could be argued that this situation creates a space where students are more active and engaged in classroom activities; on the other hand, one could question whether this way of organising teaching puts more focus on personal attributes and creating asymmetrical relations among the participants.

As an alternative to video conference systems, there has been some interest among educators in using 3D-based Multiuser Virtual Environments (MUVE) to facilitate online synchronous teaching activities. In a MUVE, all participants are represented by avatars that they can customize according to their preferences (e.g. gender, clothing, skin colour, hair, age, etc.). MUVEs in education have been used across a variety of subjects and contexts (see for example, Barab et al., 2005; Englund, 2017; Pasfield-Neofitou et al., 2015; Wang & Burton, 2013). In teacher education, MUVE has been used to facilitate role-play instructions (Vasileiou & Paraskeva, 2010), as well as problem-based learning (Mørch et al., 2016).

This paper examines the potential benefits of using a Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE) for student collaboration. The study was conducted in two courses: a 15-credit bachelor course in Distributed Collaborative Learning in teacher education at Oslo Metropolitan University and a 3-credit MA course in Learning and Collaboration Technologies at the University of Limerick, both using Open Simulator. For a period of three weeks, Irish and Norwegian students collaborated on a project within the MUVE. The project started with an introductory lecture on Open Simulator and ended with a student presentation of each group’s work. Both courses were entirely online, and the student groups were already familiar with video-based online courses but had little to no experience of MUVE-based teaching and learning environments.

The purpose of this paper is to explore if a Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE) enhances or diminishes nonverbal communication opportunities compared to video-based (non-avatar) interactions. Additionally, we will examine if being represented as an avatar in a MUVE shifts the focus away from personal characteristics and increases focus on the subject matter during communication among students.

The contextual framework for this study is a 3D-based virtual campus, where students and teachers were represented as avatars interacting with each other. In this case study, the virtual environment was designed like a university campus. The methodologies employed in this study involve a qualitative research analysis using virtual ethnography (Hetland & Mørch, 2016; Hine, 2015) of student activities taking place in a virtual world. All sessions were observed and recorded at a distance in the virtual world using screen capture software. The observations were followed up using qualitative interviews with selected students and evaluating excerpts from blogs. The interviews focused on their experiences of interaction in the virtual environment both as individuals and as part of a group. Students were also involved as co-interpreters of selected parts of the recordings. In our selection for data sample, we concentrated on scenarios where students worked in groups to share ideas and organise their work. These tasks included information sharing and negotiations for establishing shared understandings of the tasks.

Preliminary findings suggest that a shared virtual environment and avatar representations of teachers and students results in a decreased focus on individual attributes and an increased focus on the subject matter of study. Results from this study could be of interest to other universities engaged in developing and facilitating online synchronous teaching and student collaboration. Indeed, the findings may be of wider interest to the many organizations where virtual collaboration is now commonplace.

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