Designing Web-Based Educational Virtual Reality Environments - Teaching through Multi-User Virtual Environments - page 172

simulations, the communication among students
and professors, the use of appropriate notes and
medical images as well as the attendance at lec-
tures or even at surgical operations performed
by experienced surgeons. Therefore, distance
education in medicine needs complex learn-
ing applications ensuring the fulfillment of the
aforementioned requirements. In this chapter, we
propose an integrated virtual learning environment
for distance education in medicine through web,
which reproduces conditions of a real learning
process and enhances learning through a real-time
interactive simulator.
Specifically, the objectives of the proposed
learning environment are the following:

veloped in a real classroom. Collaborative
learning is achieved through asynchronous
communication (e-mails), which provide
a complete space and time independence
among professors and students.

• Support of simulations: One of the main

objectives of the application is to provide
a support platform for web-based medical
simulations accompanied by relative edu-
cational content. The medical simulation
that is currently supported by the applica-
tion is the simulation of Hepatic Cells.

• Connection to external data sources: A

critical issue in education is the easy ac-
cess of students to a wide range of scientif-
ic sources. The proposed application takes
advantage of the benefits arising from the
use of web to connect students to external
e-libraries allowing so the searching of
further information related with the educa-
tional content of the application.

• Provision of learning content : Medical

education requires medical images of high
resolution as well as the use of microscopes
from the learners themselves. To fulfill this
requirement the system provides a wide
range of medical images taken with a mi-
croscope. Furthermore, it contains relative
educational content from the real learning
process at the university.

The designing of a web-based virtual learn-
ing environment requires a combination of
heterogeneous technologies considering various
pedagogical methods and designing requirements
as presented in previous sections. The proposed
system is essentially a hypermedia application
and thus it is a collection of HTML pages, which
constitute the base of the application. Due to its
hypermedia nature, the application is approachable
via web and allows asynchronous communication
and connections to external e-libraries. A com-
mon prototype was followed for the designing
of all HTML pages, as shown in Figure 6, while
the VRML worlds are embedded and presented
always at the centre of the HTML pages.
The virtual environment consists of a set of
virtual worlds, each of which performs a different
educational role. The use of 3D graphics in the
learning application aims to create an attractive
environment, in which students can perceive and
assimilate easier the educational material. Hence,
the fundamental goal is to engage students' atten-

• Attendance at virtual lectures: The role

of a professor in a real learning process
as well as the teaching of courses through
lectures at the university can not be sub-
stituted by notes. Advices or experiences
transferred from professors to students
are considered a critical part of a learn-
ing process. Virtual reality and multimedia
technologies can reproduce a real lecture
transferring students to a virtual class-
room, where videos are projected on vir-
tual screens. This technology can also be
used for the reproduction of documenta-
ries, conference talks, lectures from other
universities and so on.

• Cooperation among the members of the

application: The communication among
the members of a learning process is a pre-
requisite for the creation of conditions de-