Abstract:

Virtual education environment based on avatar provides learners with immersive learning experience. Avatar is to realize the interaction between learners and computer interface，which can improve the learning effect and stimulate learners' potential by enhancing learners' presence. With the popularization and development of virtual reality technology (VR for short), virtual education environment based on VR is increasingly advanced. In order to explore the impact of avatars on education in virtual educational environments, a literature review was conducted to determine the representation, application status, advantages, challenges and future educational potential of avatars in educational contexts.

In this paper, 26 high-impact journals were selected to conduct a literature review using 42 papers in the past 10 years (2010-2020) that applied avatar-based virtual teaching environment to teaching. The author uses qualitative and complementary description methods to analyze the content of the paper, and constructs a coding and analysis framework from the aspects of representation, applied disciplines, teaching effects, and research deficiencies.

The results show that, virtual avatars are designed mainly from the aspects of personalized appearance, behavior, action, person perspective, gender and age, which are divided into five possible presentations: demonstrative, experiential, diagnostic, role-playing and constructional. Avatars are mainly used in science, medicine, pedagogy and interdisciplinary studies, among which they are most widely used in the medical field, such as virtual teaching experiments and pre-service training. Constructivism Learning Theory, collaborative learning and Situated learning have been widely used in avatar-based virtual education environments. The avatar-based virtual learning environment visualizes difficult content, which not only improves learners' learning effect and learning attitude, but also improves learners' presence and effective participation in learning. Students interact through avatars, which promotes learners' ability to interact and collaborate.

The integration of avatars and education still has some problems, such as high cost, difficult technology, unreasonable design of teaching process and ethics. But avatar-based virtual worlds offer unique educational experiences, and by solving the above problems, avatars still have great educational potential. Future research should not only improve the usability of avatars, but also focus on the integration of avatar-based virtual world with a wider range of disciplines, so as to explore more effective teaching methods, instructional design processes and teaching quality evaluation dimensions. For educators and researchers of virtual education environments, this study provides a relatively comprehensive explanation of the combination of avatar-based virtual education environments and specific disciplines, and makes a systematic analysis and induction based on this, which has rarely been studied before.

Keywords:

Avatar, virtual learning environment, teaching mode, presence.