Learning, Engagement, and Virtual Worlds: Virtual Worlds Pedagogy and Learning Design

This paper aims to explore the research status of task design used in virtual worlds and the student´s long-term engagement in the use of virtual worlds. Content analysis is conducted to investigate the common designed language activities in the research area. The results show that role-playing are the most common designed activities and Vygotsky´s sociocultural theory was significantly used as the theoretical frameworks among the selected studies. However, only one of the studies examined students´ further use of the virtual worlds beyond the experiment assigned time. This short paper might shed light on future exploration about the student´s long term engagement in the virtual reality environments.