Realism Experience in Virtual Learning Laboratory Environment
Romeo Kwame Bugyei, Clement Dzidonu
Journal of Information Organization, Vol. 3, No. 4, 2013.
DOI: 
Link: http://www.dline.info/jio/fulltext/v3n4/2.pdf
Abstract:
There has been a lot of research work in relation to online laboratories, however the idea of students experiencing realism when performing experiments in such environments has not been the focus when setting up online or virtual Laboratories. The purpose of this paper is to find out the importance of realism experience (RE) in relation to laboratory experiments in a virtual environment, the process of identifying them, and how to ensure that they are present when developing virtual or online laboratories. A lot of research has been carried out on the understanding of subject content with virtual laboratories and there has been a lot of success with it, however, there are other experiences that must go with these experiments to enable students adapt to real life environment. In setting up a physical laboratory the idea of making sure students experience realism as part of the learning process is a matter of course and as such not much effort is put in when setting the objectives for the laboratory, however, the same cannot be said for setting up a virtual laboratory. The paper concludes with the processes that must be followed in ensuring that realism experience is embedded in the process of performing the laboratory experiments in a virtual environment and also to be able to determine whether a physical laboratory experiment could be performed in a virtual environment without losing any of the learning experiences required to give the student total learning experience as indicated by the Bloomâ€™s taxonomy of learning domain.