Applying a 3D virtual learning environment to facilitate student’s application ability – The case of marketing

In order to understand whether a 3D virtual learning environment is effective in facilitating students’ application ability, we designed a 3D virtual supermarket (3DVS) to help business students to transform abstract class theory into concrete application ability in the real world. In the 3DVS, a virtual customer poses questions to the participant, and then the participant, as a simulated clerk, has to reply to the questions. All of the questions in the 3DVS were developed from marketing mix theory and given a scenario-based form. To understand the effects of the 3DVS, the participants were randomly divided into control group (CG) and experiment group (EG), and only the EG participants were trained with the 3DVS. After examined by pretest and posttest, the results of posttest indicated that the participants of the EG performed significantly better in terms of knowledge application than did those of the CG.