ELearn: A collaborative educational virtual environment

Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) that support collaboration is one of the new technologies that show great interest, concerning the innovative methods that gain ground in every aspect of educational procedure. In this paper, we present ELearn, a collaborative virtual learning environment for teaching e-commerce that has been developed using Active Worlds. We have constructed a virtual school using an environment that integrates the appearance of the virtual world, the web pages that are connected with specific objects in the world and the capability of synchronous chat among the users. Collaboration and interaction were two of the most significant matters taken under consideration, due to their important role in educational procedure. An evaluation of the environment is also included, with regards to specific criteria that we have developed for evaluating VLEs.