Abstract:

Due to the pandemic, online education becomes an integral part of education at all types and levels of schools. The current post-COVID-19 era is an appropriate period for revising our activities during this tough period and for taking lessons from it. Shortly before the pandemic, a group of researchers and educators From the Ostrava University and VSB – Technical University of Ostrava started the project “Improving the quality of education and strengthening students' motivation to learn by deploying a 3D virtual university campus based on virtual and augmented reality technologies in the teaching process”. Due to its low budget, its planning, design and development of the Virtual Reality Environment (VRE) required scrupulous economic thinking.

The key task of economy is minimizing the cost and maximizing the value. Compared to their in-classroom counterparts, the cost and the value play different roles in online education due to the specific style of teaching and learning. The virtual reality serves as a carrier for constructivist pedagogy, collaboration, and gamification. The learners are represented by avatars. Each of them controls his/her own avatar. The avatar follows its master’s orders and executes them. The avatars located in the same room can communicate and collaborate with each other. They can contact each other at distance, too, for example by chatting or emails. Most frequently, the avatars provide activities on behalf of their masters: treating virtual patients, piloting airplanes, visiting distant or dangerous location, and so on. The indirect operation diminishes risk of students’ failure and increases their intrinsic motivation.

Based on our experience with a VRE-exploiting Geometry course, we discuss their practicality of online education and their consequences for stakeholders’ activity and behavior. We concentrate on how these issues have been addressed in the preparation of future Geometry teachers in a virtual reality environment. To simplify and to deepen their comprehension, ready-made videos and GeoGebra software applets have been incorporated into a VRE authoring tool. Students (through their avatars) can access them, discuss their features, explain their solutions and opinions to their classmates and so on.

Cost-value features play critical role in our applied approach. As education is a service, its cost is the aggregate monetary sum of the inputs used in the service delivery. In computer-supported education, the cost includes the prices of hardware and software, internet and utilities costs, educators’ and administrator’s salaries, etc. In online education, not only the institution’s expenses must be evaluated. Teachers and students act from their private premises so their expenses should also be included among the costs. Some costs related to VRE-based courseware can be quite high, for example of 3-D eyeglasses or haptic gloves.

The economic aspects also affect the organization of education. Students in distant regions might experience Internet access problems. To prevent them, some features of computer graphic have been reduced or even excluded. Naturally, such changes had to be adequately reflected in our pedagogical approach. Our first experiences indicate positive development of algorithmic thinking and spatial imagination of students. Consequently, the value of our educational service – the end users’ critical factor – grew to its relative maximum.

Keywords:

Virtual Reality, Online Education, GeoGebra, Geometry Education, Economic Aspects of e-learning.