Resumen de Building the new millennium skills for project management in higher education: How virtual worlds can help teachers and students?
The objective of this article is to highlight the interest and the limits of virtual reality technology borrowed from online multiplayer environments, and transferred at the university into the design of a project management course in a Master degree. In this objective, we discuss more particularly the contributions of that techno-pedagogical innovation achieved in this master using virtual worlds, to enhance the development of skills in terms of creativity, collaboration and reflexivity in project management. This innovation is based on the instructional design of a scenario in an immersive virtual environment, where student are supposed to be engaged in collaborative design and organization of project through both their avatars and 3D artifacts (3D mind mapping, interactive board, virtual 3D objects). The contributions of this techno-pedagogy are analyzed from an enactive conception of competence acquiring for one hand, at the intersection of two complementary theoretical concepts: embodied leaning and situated learning. The first concept allow the assumption according which creativity is an affective-cognitive phenomenon involving the body in social relationships social materiality, implying teachers’ creative scaffolding to enhance its learning. The second concept allow us to assume that to engage students through their virtual avatar, to design situated learning applied to social interactions in educational virtual worlds is the most relevant. We use an abductive method with various data collection: videos of students and teacher in situation in the virtual world, messaging exchanges, explanatory interviews with the teacher.The analysis of this data is organized around the identification of certain implications of the embodied configurations which seem to be closely related to:- the specific spatio-temporal configuration: overlapping and negotiation of the limits of physical and virtual bodies- multi-modality in action: disturbances and distributed reminders- the search for meaning through situated exploration.Our results show that the relationship with the avatar body in a situated learning combined with creative scaffolding in the virtual world can contribute to enact a competent, reflective, collaborative and creative project management knowledge in the context of a blended learning (face-to-face and distance learning). A pedagogy based on the enactive conception of competence, which emphasizes the commitment of the body and the whole person to situated learning, can therefore be enriched by the use of virtual worlds, at the university, allowing to preserve the place of the body in cognition in a distance collaboration.
