Lo Fang-Ying, Su Chien-Yuan, Chen Cheng-Huan
Center for General Education, Asia University, Taichung, Taiwan.
Department of Education, National University of Tainan, Tainan, Taiwan.
Cyberpsychol Behav Soc Netw. 2024 Jan;27(1):19-27. doi: 10.1089/cyber.2023.0020.
COVID-19 has prompted conferences to transition to online formats, inadvertently diminishing their emphasis on the social element. In online events, a sense of presence leading to a sense of companionship is limited in conventional conferencing platforms. Although the extant body of research on virtual conferences is growing, academic events in the Metaverse get little attention. Such events and their relevance to social presence within the Metaverse and associations among observable factors are seldom discussed. This study examined the perspectives of scholars in an online seminar during COVID-19 hosted in Gather.Town, a Metaverse-like conferencing environment. A hypothetical model was built to determine whether social presence and technology self-efficacy impact scholars' satisfaction and facilitate academic interactions. Ninety-three scholars in an academic seminar for research projects in information and computer education were polled to obtain data, which was then evaluated using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The proposed model explained 57.1 percent of the variables, and the findings showed that social presence and technology self-efficacy had a positive and significant impact on academic interactions and exchanges, as well as technology self-efficacy playing an essential role in determining overall satisfaction. However, social presence does not appear to have a direct impact on satisfaction, implying that a positive academic experience may still be achieved with or without the feature of being with others supported by the Metaverse. Although digital communication will only become more diverse and intense, it is important to understand how to maintain the basic character of human interactions virtually, even amid a pandemic. This research attempts to shed light on some critical factors in creating a conducive environment for future Metaverse-like academic events.
新冠疫情促使会议形式向线上转变，无意间削弱了对社交元素的重视。在在线活动中，传统会议平台营造的临场感进而带来的陪伴感较为有限。尽管关于虚拟会议的现有研究不断增多，但元宇宙中的学术活动却很少受到关注。此类活动及其与元宇宙中社交临场感以及可观察因素之间的关联很少被讨论。本研究考察了在类似元宇宙的会议环境Gather.Town中举办的新冠疫情期间线上研讨会上学者们的观点。构建了一个假设模型，以确定社交临场感和技术自我效能感是否会影响学者的满意度并促进学术互动。对93名参加信息与计算机教育研究项目学术研讨会的学者进行了调查以获取数据，然后使用偏最小二乘结构方程模型（PLS-SEM）对数据进行评估。所提出的模型解释了57.1%的变量，研究结果表明，社交临场感和技术自我效能感对学术互动与交流有积极且显著的影响，并且技术自我效能感在决定总体满意度方面发挥着重要作用。然而，社交临场感似乎对满意度没有直接影响，这意味着无论有无元宇宙所支持的与他人在一起的特征，都可能获得积极的学术体验。尽管数字通信只会变得更加多样和频繁，但了解如何在虚拟环境中保持人际互动的基本特征很重要，即使是在疫情期间。本研究试图阐明为未来类似元宇宙的学术活动营造有利环境的一些关键因素。
