Enhancing social presence and socialisation in distance education using virtual environments

Abstract

In this paper, we describe some of the findings of a case study, which examines the potential and drawbacks of Moodle and Second life in fostering socialisation and social presence for collaboration and learning outcomes in distance education courses. This study focuses on the introductory module of the Masters course “Pedagogy of eLearning” which was designed to provide students with insights into some online tools and the pedagogy for learning online adopted at the institution. The data was retrieved from the online discussion forums in Moodle and from the chatlogs in Second Life. Interviews were used to collect further information. Discourse analysis techniques were used to examine the resulting transcript of texts for evidence of data according to several researchers. We present some conclusions and questions for further research concerning distance education courses in virtual environments.