Virtual Parabola Festival: The Platform Design and Learning Strategies for Virtual Learning Community of Practice

This paper initiates the preliminary study on the designs of facilitating a virtual learning community of practice (VCoP). By means of a role-playing game, thematic plotting, and multi-learner engagement, a virtual learning environment is built as the primary learning metaphor into the discussion. First, the Best Digital Village (BDV) is introduced. Second, the parabola flight formula is chosen to be the thematic learning medium, and it is packaged with other learning tasks as a whole learning content called Parabola Festival. In addition to the framework of the system architecture, each learning scene and task is presented and explained as the secondary learning metaphor, including the strategy that uses team collaboration, peer evaluation, profile information, and so on. A Further discussion is made on the approaches based on the three aspects of learning interface design: learner-learner, learner-learning context, and learner-learning activities. Finally, the system prototype is briefly explained to empirically explore the promise of virtual learning worlds.