Game-based virtual-world environments to engage lifelong learners in open courseware for open learning

The Open Educational Resource (OER) movement has reached its tipping point in recent years due to advancement of technologies. The OpenCourseWare (OCW) of MIT, for instance, has inspired higher education institutions around the world to deploy OCW systems that provide educational contents free of charge to lifelong learners. In Taiwan, the Opensource Opencourse Prototype System (OOPS; www. myoops.org) plays a significant role in enabling Chinese-speaking learners to benefit from this global movement. Although OOPS has attracted hundreds of thousands of users with open courses translated into Chinese, understanding who these users are and why they chose this particular venue to advance their informal and lifelong learning remains elusive. As a result, the OOPS and other compatible open courseware portals around the world are often challenged by issues related to user engagement that could ultimately determine the sustainability of any open courseware portals. From the perspective of learning system design, it is impossible to develop and deploy effective user engagement strategies without knowing who the users are and what drive them to use the open learning system. To address this issue, this chapter, informed by open courseware users' feedback, proposes a game-based learning approach situated in virtual worlds to improve and sustain user engagement in open learning environments.