Social virtual worlds provide students in remote online courses with a unique approach to collaborative work and social interactions. However, the use of social virtual worlds in online learning raises concerns about what privacy and ethical issues students might encounter. To shed light on this topic, we examined college students' ( N = 68) ethical and privacy concerns about using social virtual worlds in multiple class sessions, courses, universities, virtual environments, and technologies. Students revealed (a) struggling to manage their identity between classmates and strangers, (b) discomfort over violations of their avatars' personal space, (c) problems of vulnerable populations experiencing harassment, nudity, and loneliness, and (d) concern over companies tracking and storing user data. In addition, the students described the technological advantages that mitigated their privacy and ethical concerns. We discuss the implications of our findings for the future of collaborative learning and the design of social virtual worlds.

While VR, through decades of research, has shown to successfully improve young children's lives, more research needs to examine the appropriateness of VR for children, including its design. The type of character in combination with the perceptual realism of virtual reality (VR) may influence children's perceptions of VR experiences. A within-participant experiment examined 5- to 9-year-old children's (N = 25) perceptions of three different character types in VR (i.e., human, animal, and anthropomorphized creature) based on their level of social realism. Results showed that character type impacted children's (a) social-emotional descriptions of the VR experience, (b) if VR's realism was an asset or a hindrance, and (c) primed thoughts about fantasy versus reality. However, children experienced the embodiment and personification of the characters similarly across all character types. Finally, children recalled the salient aspects of the characters they remembered and identified elements to improve the VR characters’ design.

Immersive technology, such as virtual reality (VR), has become more integrated in children's lives transforming how they experience education, medical treatment, and entertainment. In VR, children are likely to engage with interactive and socially real characters. To examine children's experience of virtual characters in VR, we studied 5-to 9-year old's (N= 25) spontaneous reactions towards three virtual character types (human, anthropomorphized fictional Muppet, animal). Results showed children engaged in four major behavioral interactions: they tried to touch the characters, embodied the characters, talked directly to the characters, and referred to themselves in regard to the virtual environment. These results suggest that children test concepts of realism through touch and verbalizations and physically examine social boundaries. Additionally, children consider self-representation while in a virtual environment. We discuss the implications of these results for future work and provide design considerations when creating VR content with and for children.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many university classes shifted to remote learning. In some cases, this requirement intersected in productive ways with course content, especially when the class subject matter included virtual environments. This paper describes teacher and student experiences in an upper-level communication course on virtual worlds at a large United States university. As regular lectures moved to video conferencing and asynchronous communication, "field trips" and guest lectures became opportunities for students and teachers to connect remotely using desktops and headsets. We discuss how this will inform the design of future courses that combine face-to-face and virtual instruction.