ABSTRACT
The design and implementation of the virtual learning environment (VLE) or elearning platforms have grown exponentially in the last years, spurred by the fact that neither students nor teachers are bound to a specific location and that this form of computer-based education is virtually independent of any specific hardware platforms. These systems can potentially eliminate barriers and provide: flexibility, constantly updated material, student memory retention, individualized learning, and feedback superior to the traditional classroom, thus becoming an essential accessory to support both the face-to-face classroom and distance learning. The use of these applications accumulates a great amount of information because they can record all the information about students’ actions and interactions in log files and data sets. Nowadays, there has been a growing interest in analyzing this valuable information to detect possible errors, shortcomings and improvements in student performance and discover how the student’s motivation affects the way he or she interacts with the software. All previous studies have used traditional supervised learning to represent the problem. However, such representation generates instances with many missing values because the information about the problem is incomplete. Each course has different types and numbers of activities and each student carries out the number of activities considered most interesting, dedicating more or less time to resolve them. In this context, the multiple instance learning (MIL) representation makes possible a more appropriate representation of available information. MIL stores the general information of each pattern by means of bag attributes and specific information about the student’s work on each pattern by means of a variable number of instances. This chapter explains that 3D Virtual Reality is mature enough to be used for enhancing communication of ideas and concepts and stimulate the interest of students compared to 2D education. Web3D is a good and available platform for experimenting with creation of new tools as well as applications for tele-presence in form of 3D world’s models. 3D Virtual Reality, software tools and associated Web technologies are mature enough to be used in conjunction with advanced e-learning systems. 3D-based content can enhance communication of ideas and concepts and stimulate the interest of students.
