WebTalkCube: a Framework to Add One Dimension to eLearning

E-Learning is gaining increasing momentum as a teaching approach, both within universities and in general within funded courses, in Italy and abroad. It is in these specific learning environments, that vast numbers of students encounter eLearning as a mean to cut times and costs of lesson-going, capitalizing their time and their efforts for a better preparation. Enterprise-wide eLearning, used in companies and associations, is also perceived as a key instrument to train human resources reducing costs. However, especially in the range of funded courses directed to a lesser educated audience in respect to undergraduates, post-docs, or highly-motivated employees within an enterprise, sustaining the trainee’s attention for eLearning courses of long duration (e.g. entire ECDL preparation courses given in eLearning format, or history courses in intermediate schools) may be a problem, reducing the effectiveness and the benefits of the eLearning approach. Starting from these issues, the problem of which teaching methodologies are to be applied to eLearning is currently one the most debated at the moment. In this paper, we advocate the necessity to intermingle the present eLearning approach, mainly based on bi-dimensional multimedia presentation of the contents (with varying degrees of exploitation of sound, graphics and interactivity), with new types of eLearning, based on the exploitation of 3D representation, thus adding one dimension to the current way of thinking eLearning. The paper will show our early experiments on the subject, and how we used 3D and networking technologies to leverage collaboration between students that are working on the same eLearning modules in different places, thus creating blended, distributed eLearning activities, and extending the current concept of eLearning (today mainly perceived as “remote learning”). After having commented the results we obtained within two of our main experiments, we elaborate on a new framework which would support better this new eLearning paradigm, we describe its architectural structure, and the directions of our future work.