Virtual Worlds – Disadvantages

References provided in Literature Section

• Rich, highly interactive sites can cause cognitive overload and interfere with attention (Nah, Eschenbrenner, & DeWester, 2011)
• Too many avatars participating at the same time can cause a lag in the system responsiveness (Mennecke et al., 2008)
• Provides a convenient way to meet (no travel time, work around individual schedules) (Chang, Gutl, Kopeinik, & Williams, 2009)
• Lack of understanding by practitioners on how to implement and moderate appropriate activities or engage the students (Mimirinis & Bhattacharya, 2007; Minocha & Roberts, 2008)
• Need to have a newer computer (Hew & Cheung, 2010)
• Creating a Second Life learning environment takes planning, effort, and time (Chang, Gutl, Kopeinik, & Williams, 2009)
• Is time consuming to provide rights at the user and group level to access and work with the collaboration spaces (Chang, Gutl, Kopeinik, & Williams, 2009)
• Currently lacks a variety of tools that support information sharing, that is, allowing users to create content, present content, and collaboratively update the content (Bouras, Giannaka, & Tsiatsos, 2008)
• perating collaborative tools is difficult (Chang, Gutl, Kopeinik, & Williams, 2009)
• Have to learn avatar names to know who you are interacting with (Chang, Gutl, Kopeinik, & Williams, 2009)
• Inability to express emotions even though VoIP and Skype were used (Chang, Gutl, Kopeinik, & Williams, 2009)
• Need to address issues: protection of intellectual property rights, protection against plagiarism, allocation of rights, only one media stream per parcel, can’t scroll web pages, limited number of primitive building blocks, difficult to create collaborative tools, the content on the collaborative tools is static (Chang, Gutl, Kopeinik, & Williams, 2009)
• Have to use a work around to overcome issues with dynamic text display (De Lucia, 2009).
• Not applicable where kinesthetic experiences are part of the learning process [without the aid of additional support] (Dickey, 2005)
• Have to be able to instantaneously formulate responses and type fast through the chat tool (Hew & Cheung, 2010)
• No provision for turn-taking or threaded discussion (Hew & Cheung, 2010)
• Requires more work for the instructor to manage activities and student interactions in comparison to traditional online distance learning courses (O’Connor, 2009)