Learning, engagement and virtual worlds

This paper aims to explore the research status of task design used in virtual worlds and the student's long-term engagement in the use of virtual worlds. Content analysis is conducted to investigate the common designed language activities in the research area. The results show that role- playing are the most common designed activities and Vygotsky's sociocultural theory was significantly used as the theoretical frameworks among the selected studies. However, only one of the studies examined students' further use of the virtual worlds beyond the experiment assigned time. This short paper might shed light on future exploration about the student's long term engagement in the virtual reality environments.