DESIGNING A SITUATIONAL 3D VIRTUAL LEARNING
ENVIRONMENT TO BRIDGE BUSINESS THEORY AND
PRACTICE
The Role of Scaffolding
Shwu-Huey Wang and Yufang Cheng
Department of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Far East University
49, Chunghua Rd., Hsinshih District, Tainan 74448, Taiwan, China
Graduate Institute of e-Learning, National Changhua University of Education
1 Jin De Rd., Changhua 50007, Taiwan, China
Keywords: Virtual Learning Environment, Virtual Reality.
Abstract: The objective of the study is to explore the effect of scaffolding strategy in enhancing students’ application
ability in a 3D virtual learning environment. In order to provide students with a “hands-on” experience, we
utilized virtual reality technology to build a 3D virtual supermarket (3DVS) to guide students to apply class
theory to the practice. There is a female virtual customer poses questions during her shopping in the 3DVS,
the participants have to be a clerk to answer the questions. The questions posed by the virtual customer are
designed based on marketing mix theory (Kotler et al., 2006). We invited ten students to understand the
system efficiency. The results of the interview indicated that the participants hold quite positive comments
toward the system.
1 INTRODUCTION
Business students have to face the real world’s
problems right after graduation. However, most of
them failed to well apply class theory to practice due
to the disconnection of the above two factors.
Constructivists (Vygotsky, 1978) claim that
“experience” is a critical factor in learning process.
To shorten the gap between theory and practice,
business educators have been utilizing computer
technology to provide students with many
opportunities of experiential learning and try to
enhance their decision-making and problem solving
ability as possible as they can. However, the
traditional lecture-based pedagogy in business
school kept students be passive learners and did not
give them opportunities to practice how to apply
class learning to the practice, which left much space
to be improved. Further, to be adapted in the real
business world as soon as possible, students need to
have a real- and life-like to integrate their class
knowledge with practice.
Recently, virtual reality (VR) technology has been
widely applied to various areas of education (such as
the fields of science, medical, art, engineering, and
vocational education). With the features of visibility,
tangibility, manipulatability and interactivity, VR
provides learners with a safety and repeated learning
environment. Relatively, it highly reduces the
learning/training cost. In the study, we build a 3D
virtual learning environment to help students bridge
theory and practice. On the other hand, for real
world’s problems are usually complicated for novice
to reply, we utilized scaffolding strategy to guide
students to answer the questions so that it will be
easier for them to accomplish the task. Therefore,
the objective of the paper is to explore the effect of
scaffolding strategy in a 3D virtual learning
environment.
2 THEORETICAL
BACKGROUND
2.1 Situated Learning
Situated learning theory (Lave & Wenger, 1991)
313
Wang S. and Cheng Y..
DESIGNING A SITUATIONAL 3D VIRTUAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT TO BRIDGE BUSINESS THEORY AND PRACTICE - The Role of Scaffolding.
DOI: 10.5220/0003414103130315
In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS-2011), pages 313-315
ISBN: 978-989-8425-56-0
Copyright
c
2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
provides a theoretical background for VLE. The
theorists claimed that learners are regarded as a
participant in a community of practice; they are
agents of their own learning in the process.
Therefore, situated learning is the process that
conveys knowledge through personal experiences.
Meanwhile, past research concluded: “learning
should be grounded in a practical world of everyday
life” (Hedgegaard, 1998). Contrary to usual learning
approach, situated learning theory stresses that
learning activities should always be put into
empirical settings to stimulate practical or
theoretical ideas (
Rømer, 2002). Based on situated
learning approach, it’ll be easier for students to learn
knowledge where it is applied. In other words,
“problem situations that closely resemble real
situations in their richness and complexity so that
the experience that students gain in the classroom
will be transferable" (Schoenfeld, 1992, p. 365).
2.2 Scaffolding
Vygotsky (1978) claimed that teaching with guided
interaction could be helpful to enhance a higher
level of thinking, so it is essential to employ a proper
teaching technique to facilitate students to integrate
the textbook knowledge and decision ability in the
real world. Scaffolding refers to a certain process
that enables a novice or a child to solve a problem,
implement a task, or achieve a goal which would be
slightly beyond his ability (Wood, Bruner, and
Ross,1978). Scaffolding tools that have been
examined in the past research included question
prompting (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1985;
Scardamalia, Bereiter, & Steinbach, 1984), expert
modeling (e.g., Shoenfeld, 1985), reciprocal
teaching (Palincsar & Brown, 1984), and guided
peer questioning (King, 1991, 1992, 1994). In the
system, we utilized question prompt technique to
guide the participants to answer the questions.
2.3 The Situational 3D Virtual
Learning Environment
Based on the theoretical framework stated above, we
revised the situational 3D virtual learning
environment (3D virtual supermarket; 3DVS) based
on the prototype to help business students to
personally experience the real-like simulated
environment to apply
class theory to the real world.
The virtual objects in the 3DVS are constructed
through 3D modeling software --- 3Ds Max. To be
as appealing as possible, all the virtual merchandises
are displayed by departments and in the way of a
real supermarket. The background of the 3DVS (like
the ceiling, floor, wall, shelves and lighting) is also
designed through 3Ds Max in order to be as real-like
as possible. There is a virtual female customer, who
is created from 3Ds Max, designed to pose questions
in the environment. The database system is drawn to
record the participants’ answers and designed
through MySql and Java programming.
When the system starts to process, the background
music is played, it goes down when the virtual
customer is going to stop. During the virtual
customers shopping procedure, she poses various
questions based on the different departments she
arrives at. A total of 10 questions are posed by the
virtual customer.
Basically, all the questions, developed from
marketing mix theory (Kotler et al., 2006), are
formed to be a scenario-based environment, which is
to provide a series of logically linked real-world
case to scaffold students to apply class theory to
the
real world and higher-order thinking. Students are
requested to reply the questions from the standpoint
of a customer. The participants were guided to
answer the questions by scaffolding specified after
the question. Scaffolding strategies employed in the
system include question prompting and reflective
prompting.
3 PILOT STUDY
Ten undergraduate students in the course of
marketing from a university in Taiwan were selected
to participate in the pilot study. The participants
were allowed two hours to finish the experiment,
they were found to spend much time on thinking and
integrating theory and practice during the process. In
addition, a follow-up interview was conducted to
explore the role of scaffolding strategy in the virtual
learning environment and understand how helpful is
the system in learning.
4 THE PRELIMINARY RESULTS
The preliminary results indicated that the
participants hold quite positive attitude toward the
system. First, the scaffolding strategy (question
prompting and reflective prompting) used in the
ICEIS 2011 - 13th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems
314
system effectively helped students apply class theory
to the practice. Second, the real-like system guided
the participants to have the sense of “walk into” the
environment, which give them the experience of real
life. Even the experiment was not conducted in the
real world; the participants reported that the
experience is real-like. Third, the vivid environment
not only provided much pleasure on learning but
also contributed a lot on transforming abstract theory
to be concrete application ability. Finally, the
participants all consented that the scaffolding
strategy employed in the system is helpful in guiding
them to properly answer the questions.
5 CONCLUSIONS
The system is being revised and modified based on
the preliminary results. Though the participants
reported that the system is quite beneficial on
shortening the gap between theory and practice, we
hope that the design may lead to more varieties of
application on future business education to support
student’s adaptation of the challenging business
career.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The study was financially supported under contract
nos. NSC 99-2511-S-269-002.
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