…our involvement with new technologies generally moves from an ambivalent relationship with augmented abilities to the ‘dawning of irreversible change’ (Midani cited in Marcus 1996, p. 273).

The history of the application of technologies to support learning and teaching long predates the emergence of virtual worlds as immersive platforms for engaging students in authentic, culturally diverse experiential learning activities. Yet the all too familiar pattern of technological adoption described in Gartner’s Hype Cycle (2017) has persisted, with an initial trigger (often accompanied by a level of ambivalence) followed by the peak of inflated expectations, the trough of disillusionment, the slope of enlightenment and then the plateau of productivity. It is at this ‘plateau of productivity’ stage of the hype cycle that, in Midani’s words, comes the ‘dawning of irreversible change’ (Midani 1986, cited in Marcus 1996, p. 273), as educators engage in emerging research, experiment with innovative applications of virtual worlds to support learning and teaching, and begin to appreciate the affordances that the technology offers to engage their students.

Such has been the pattern of engagement of teachers in the use of virtual worlds in higher education since their emergence in the 1980s and their ascendance to the peak of their popularity in 2007 (Lowendahl 2016). Now ten years later, virtual worlds are no longer at the peak of the technological hype cycle, having descended into the ‘trough of disillusionment’ in 2010, ascended to the ‘slope of enlightenment’ in 2014 and having attained the ‘plateau of productivity’ in 2015 (Lowendahl 2016). The potential of virtual worlds as immersive environments engaging students in authentic learning activities that can help to facilitate the development of the skills required of a twenty-first-century graduate is now being realised. These skills include problem-solving, the ability to work with others, communication and appreciation of, and respect for, diversity (Denson and Zhang 2010).

There is a growing body of evidence demonstrating the centrality and importance of students having the ability to communicate effectively across cultures in increasingly globalised, multicultural and networked workplaces (Freeman et al. 2009; Leask and Wallace 2011). International research has also demonstrated the ways in which student experiences with diversity can positively affect other graduate attributes (Denson and Zhang 2010). Intercultural competence is an employability skill identified by employers as a major factor influencing graduates’ performance in the workplace (CSWDF 2013) and is identified as an important generic skill in many university graduate attribute profiles (Donelavey 2011; Oliver 2011). Students also need to develop a nuanced understanding of the dynamic and fluid dimensions of culture (Guo and Jamal 2007) and engage with the contested nature of essentialist categorisations of culture and diversity (Bozalek 2011).

Deardorff (2006, pp. 247–248) defines intercultural competence as ‘the understanding of others’ world views’ and ‘the ability to communicate effectively and appropriately in intercultural situations based on one’s intercultural knowledge, skills, and attitudes’. Graduates of the twenty-first century need to be able to demonstrate intercultural skills such as being able to communicate and work collaboratively across cultures, be aware and responsive to others’ world views, have a deep understanding and knowledge of culture, including contexts, respect and value other cultures, be open to intercultural learning and to people from other cultures, and demonstrate the ability to tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty (Deardorff 2006).

It is now well recognised that twenty-first-century graduates need to be able to respond to complexity and uncertainty (Craft 2006; Florida 2003; McWilliam 2007). One way of equipping our graduates with these employability skills is to embed creative problem-solving within authentic tasks (Lindsay and Wood 2015) designed to ‘reflect the way the knowledge will be useful in real life’ (Brown et al. 1989, p. 2). Creative problem-solving involves the development of domain-relevant skills, creativity-relevant processes and task motivation (Amabile 1996). Domain-relevant skills are required for learners to understand the full range of response possibilities from which new responses are to be synthesised, and the information against which the new responses are to be judged (Csikszentmihalyi 1999). Creativity-relevant processes assist students to respond in ways that extend their response in a given domain (Dewett 2003), and learning is enhanced when tasks are intrinsically motivating (Csikszentmihalyi 1999), and authentic.

Brown et al. (1989) argue that learning is a process of enculturation, and students learn best through situated learning in which the activities are authentic, coherent, meaningful, purposeful and situated within the practices of the relevant professional culture. The principles of authentic learning are based on Brown, Collins and Duguid’s theories of situated cognition and cognitive apprenticeship. Herrington, Reeves and Oliver’s (2010) authentic learning framework identifies nine elements of authentic learning: (1) authentic contexts; (2) authentic tasks; (3) access to expert performances and the modelling of processes; (4) multiple roles and perspectives; (5) collaborative construction of knowledge; (6) reflection to enable abstractions to be formed; (7) articulation to enable tacit knowledge to be made explicit; (8) coaching and scaffolding; and (9) authentic assessment of learning.

The affordances of virtual worlds make these technologically mediated environments well suited to facilitating the development of students’ employability skills including the ability engage in creative problem-solving and to communicate effectively across cultures through authentic learning activities. An affordance can be defined as the perceived and actual properties of the technology that determine how that technology can be used for learning (Salomon 1997, p. 51). Dalgarno and Lee (2010) have identified five primary affordances of the virtual worlds in higher education: (1) enhancing spatial knowledge representation of the explored domain; (2) enabling experiential learning activities that would be impractical or impossible to undertake in the ‘real world’; (3) facilitating intrinsically motivating learning tasks; (4) providing learning opportunities that support the transfer of knowledge and skills to ‘real’ situations through contextualisation of learning; and (5) facilitating rich and effective collaborative learning tasks. Similarly, Savin-Baden et al. (2010) suggest that the affordances of virtual worlds make them ideally suited for scenarios, simulations and role-plays, and activities involving teamwork or team building. Thus, virtual worlds provide an ideal medium for engaging students in collaborative, intrinsically motivating, authentic learning activities that enable them to develop graduate employability skills including creative problem-solving, and cultural understanding while facilitating the transfer of knowledge to ‘real’ situations.

In 2009, virtual world academics and researchers from Australian and New Zealand decided to join forces to form the Australian and New Zealand Virtual Worlds Working Group (VWWG). The VWWG began with ten members and has since grown to approximately 200, with most educational institutions represented in the group. Members have come and gone but the numbers remain steady. The members range from a vast variety of disciplines with academics involved in teaching and research: Higher Degree Research candidates, project managers, virtual world builders and developers, and educators in the VET sector. The academics and researchers collaborate to identify research gaps and providing best practices in the use of virtual worlds for teaching and learning. Members were invited to contribute to this book, of which there are ten chapters from esteemed authors from across the two countries. They share their experiences of engaging students in authentic learning activities designed to facilitate the development of their technical and employability skills by utilising the affordances of the virtual world platform.

In the first chapter, Marcia Thorne and Colin MacGregor describe the use of virtual worlds in a blended learning approach to provide their students with authentic learning activities designed to facilitate students’ ability to apply real-world critical thinking and problem-solving relating to environmental, social and economic challenges facing humanity in the twenty-first century. Applying a communal constructivist learning approach, the authors found that the authentic learning activities undertaken in the virtual world supported knowledge sharing between students, and enhanced their creative and problem-solving abilities as they engaged with virtual spaces that provide an online representation of real-world sustainability projects, and provided teachers and students with access to professional global sustainability networks.

In Chap. 2, Debbie Corder and Alice U-Mackey discuss their use of the virtual world for facilitating the development of students’ intercultural competence in a first-year module. The authors explore the symbiotic synergies between the affordances of virtual worlds for intercultural competence development, and the need for intercultural competence for effective engagement in virtual worlds. The authors describe the pedagogical approach adopted, including introducing students to intercultural competence theory and tools for intercultural competence development, followed by an introduction to sociocultural and sociolinguistic theoretical concepts. Students were introduced to the virtual world as an example of a different culture, and the affordances of the platform for developing intercultural competence were explained. Using a case study approach, the authors describe the complex interplay between intercultural competence attributes and intercultural encounters in the virtual world.

The use of virtual worlds as restorative environments is the focus of the third chapter by Janice Jones, Helen Farley and Angela Murphy. The authors describe the final stage of a three-year study of future educators’ well-being, awareness of natural environments and sustainability, and creativity. This third stage of the study involved an investigation into impact of engaging students in natural-seeming environments through an immersive virtual world experience on restorative effects such as reduced attentional fatigue and affective states.

In Chap. 4, Torsten Reiners and colleagues demonstrate a prototype of a framework (nDiVE), which combines authentic education, gamification, emerging technology and design-principles used in the game industry to create an engaging learning space for students and workers in the context of Health and Safety within Logistics Infrastructures. They describe the nDiVE framework as a potentially effective approach to providing students with authentic unrestricted and unsupervised exploration of virtual world spaces while also providing them with scripted guidance and formative feedback; in a sense, the technology provides the expert guidance that would be available to apprentices in a real-world context.

Chapter 5 focuses on an innovative approach to conducting formative assessment of action-based learning scenarios conducted in the virtual world. The authors, Ali Fardinpour, Torsten Reiners and Lincoln C. Wood, describe features of the Action-based Learning Assessment Method (ALAM), which provides formative assessment of students’ performed goal-oriented actions in a simulated virtual world environment. Their research aims to provide an automated assessment solution to the provision of high-level formative feedback in virtual worlds.

In Chap. 6, Scott Grant, Hui Huang and Sarah Pasfield-Neofitou discuss the potential of virtual worlds for providing authentic study abroad experiences by engaging students in activities that enable them to develop their language and communicative competence. The authors explore the impact on students’ level of foreign language anxiety (FLA) through task-based learning activities in a virtual world environment that simulates an authentic study abroad experience.

Cognitive engagement in language learning through authentic virtual world activities is the focus of Chap. 7. In this chapter, Michael Henderson, Lyn Henderson, Scott Grant and Hui Huang describe eight key affordances of virtual worlds for teaching and learning of second languages and intercultural awareness. They suggest that undertaking such activities in virtual worlds can promote deeper-level thinking processes, providing there is appropriate alignment of the sequence of tasks and clarity of instructional design to enable students to focus on thinking about the content rather than instructions.

In Chap. 8, Lisa Jacka and Matthew Hill explore pre-service teachers’ perceptions of virtual worlds as having potential for use in their future classrooms. The authors posit that by increasing future educators’ knowledge about virtual worlds as both users and to design meaningful learning experiences for their future students, a higher level of engagement will be achieved.

In Chap. 9, Des Butler describes the use of Second Life machinima facilitated narratives to support cognitive and imaginative engagement across the undergraduate law curriculum. He suggests that machinima provides an authentic learning experience that is a cost-effective means of promoting the imaginative engagement of students, while assisting cognition, provoking active thinking and providing contextual clues that aid later recall. He concludes that machinima has the potential to create authentic learning experiences that can enable students to take an active and practical role in their learning, while also helping them to appreciate the relevance to their future professional careers.

The use of virtual worlds to facilitate students’ business decision-making skills is the focus of Chap. 10 written by Amit Rudra, Bjørn Jæger and Kristine Ludvigsen. Using a case study approach, the authors discuss the affordances of virtual worlds for supporting the mediation of tacit knowledge to support decision-making in a simulated global and distributed business environment.

These examples of the innovative use of virtual worlds to facilitate employability skills in an authentic learning environment provide evidence that virtual worlds have indeed now reached the ‘plateau of productivity’ and suggest that their impact, for at least the authors of this collection, has led to a ‘dawning of irreversible change’ (Midani 1986). The hype and overinflated expectations of virtual worlds have now passed, and the experiences that the authors of the following ten chapters share demonstrate the pedagogical approaches that educators are now employing to maximise the affordances of virtual worlds in ways that provide an authentic and engaging learning experience for their students as future professionals.