Collaborative Virtual Environments for Teaching Physics

Eafit University created a Telepresence application for distance education. It supports bi-directional audio and video and a shared virtual environment that allows the instructor and students to manipulate virtual objects in a collaborative manner, thereby reinforcing the learning process. In this paper we report the experience of creating new contents and deploying the tool in a Physics course at Universidad del Quindío. The tool was improved an extended in order to include new functionality and make it easier for development teams to create new content. Teaching for Understanding was used as pedagogical framework for course creation and also as a guide to develop the interviews that were used to capture user’s perceptions and to asses the improvements in the learning process. The results showed that the use of the tool had a positive impact on the students’ understanding of the topics at hand.