Developing a checklist for evaluating virtual worlds for use in education

The popularity of user-generated content in Virtual Worlds provides educators with an extensive range of 3D immersive resources. Some of the issues for educators are how to find the resources and how to evaluate whether they will be effective for a particular teaching and learning experience. A Checklist for Evaluating Virtual World Sims is proposed. The two page document includes thirty-seven questions under six categories. Each of these questions has a numerical rating scheme to create a final quantitative evaluation. Research in relation to virtual world typologies and criteria for evaluating Web sites has been drawn on in the development of this preliminary model.