Design instrucional aplicado ao mundo virtual TCN5

Abstract

The use of virtual environments focused on education, providing opportunities for the knowledge generation in an innovative and appropriate to the current computerized society way, is becoming increasingly popular. However, only the technology existence in schools may not be enough to the learning process. Thus, it can be seen an advance regarding the necessity of each student's specificities’ customized virtual environments. One method used to attend this demand is the Instructional Design (ID), which discusses the construction and structuring of courses with these characteristics on technological environments. In face of this, this dissertation addresses the structuring of an Instructional Design for Computer Networks learning in the Virtual World TCN5 (Teaching Computer Networks in a Free Immersive Virtual Environment). This ID has ubiquitous computing attributes such as the adaptation of educational resources to the student's level of expertise as well as the organization of pedagogical routes according to the preferences of Holistic, Serialist, Divergent and Reflective cognitive styles. In order to enlarge the possibilities of the ID, it was developed the expertise aware educational resource manager (GRECx). In this manager, the teacher can include types of files like slideshow, text, online text, image, video, task and questionnaire. These resources are exposed in the virtual world from web pages allocated to 3D objects. These pages display multiple resources, taking on basis the level of knowledge and resource type filters, which are transparent to the user and allow the student to filter resources by theme according to its needs. As contributions of this study can be cited: the organization of resources according to the learners' level of expertise and cognitive style; the multiple resource presentation on the same object of the three-dimensional environment and the expansion of the TCN5 virtual world possibilities, given the GRECx system integration to the pages that feed the contents of displayed objects.