Design and Development of a MUVE for a Distance Education Course in Philippine History
Roel P. Cantada
Faculty of Education, University of the Philippines Open University
The project explores the design and development of a Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE) for a distance education course in Philippine history. It seeks to find out what affordable learning actions MUVEs provide history teachers, and what design and development approaches are available to distance education teachers with scant resources. At the time of this project there was no available off-the-shelf game for teaching Philippine history. In addition, there is little study on courses as MUVEs in distance education. The project hopes to address these concerns. Open Simulator, a MUVE software, was used to create a historical themed virtual world. Formative research methods were adopted in the design and development of the virtual world. It has been found that the virtual world affords the adoption of a wide range of learning theories and methods. It has also been found that teachers may impose a minimal amount of instructional scaffolding through quests and placement of virtual objects. In conclusion, a series of steps and guidelines are suggested for developing virtual worlds for learning. It is recommended that teachers exploit the tools of the MUVE for collaborative design and development as well as the production of reusable virtual world archives.
Keywords: game-based learning, educational games, multi-user virtual environment, virtual worlds