Investigating the Process of Teaching the Creation of Interactive Art in a Collaborative Virtual Environmental Context

Due to the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, higher education institutes quickly turn to the use of online tools, radically transforming the modes of teaching and communication with students. This educational shift significantly affected the conduct of artistic laboratory courses, where physical presence is essential for students and teaching staff. In order to address this shift, the teaching staff for the laboratory course “Digital Artistic Creation 2”, of the Department of Digital Arts and Cinema of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens adopted a project-based learning methodology and used a combination of teleconferencing tools and multiuser 3D Social Virtual Environments, to teach the creation of interactive and possibly dynamically evolving 3D assemblages and spatial compositions. This paper presents a research study which aims at investigating the result of this teaching course with regards to the educational impact and the experience of the students. The study was conducted at the end of the semester with the use of questionnaires delivered to the students in order to explore the learning experiences, outcomes and improvisation suggestions concerning this novel, combined form of teaching, as well as to detect the emerging collaborative and self-regulated learning patterns that emerged throughout the course.