The project’s general objectives are to:

1. Integrate VE in blended-learning in higher education as an innovative way to integrate technologies in the classroom.
2. Assess the development of socio-emotional skills of students.
3. Explore the functionalities and potential of synchronous and asynchronous technological tools in regards to the development of socio-emotional skills.

Specific research objectives framing this proposal are:

1. Discover whether socio-emotional skills are (or are not) developed through the integration of VE in courses taught by the research team members at their respective universities.
2. Find out whether those skills are developed to a higher degree in the VE blended-learning lessons (experimental group, EG) than in face-to-face lessons (control group, CG).
3. Identify which factors (behaviours) conduce to skill development.
4. Integrate specific synchronous (e.g. 3D Virtual Worlds, Zoom, Teams, Google Meet) and asynchronous technologies to analyse their effect on socio-emotional skill development.
5. Develop tools that facilitate the assessment of those skills according to the indicators and levels specified in OECD’s Survey on Social and Emotional Skills (SESS, 2021) Scale.

For the purposes of this study, we shall rephrase the above-mentioned objectives as Research Objectives (ROs) 1-4 below:

• RO1. Socio-emotional skills: Determine whether students in the experimental group (EG, VE-blended group) attain higher levels of development in the 5 dimensions of the SESS Scale than the students in the control group (CG, Face-to-face group).
• RO2. Determine the factors (behaviours) that lead to the development of socio-emotional skills in both groups (CG & EG).
• RO3. Determine the impact that different synchronous (e.g. 3D Virtual Worlds, Zoom, Teams, Google Meet) & asynchronous (Padlet, Flip, Wakelet) have in the development of students’ socio-emotional skills in the VE blended-learning contexts (EG).
• RO4. Develop tools that facilitate the assessment of higher education students’ socio-emotional skills according to the indicators specified in the OECD’s SESS (2021) scale.

Methodology

In order to achieve the above-mentioned ROs, the following steps will be followed:

1. Design tools for the assessment of socio-emotional skills (pre and post-test) based on the SESS (2021) scale (Univs. Cardenal Herrera and Alcalá).
2. Organise VE exchanges between students from participating institutions (Univs. Autónoma de Madrid, Valencia, Alcalá, Pública de Navarra, Politécnica de Valencia, Limerick, Dublin City University, Espírito Santo, Sao Paulo, Hawaii, Maryland, Cyprus and New York).
3. Integrate the use of different technologies in the VEs, both synchronous and asynchronous.
4. Gather and analyse data from pre and post-tests.
5. Gather, transcribe and analyse data (oral, written and multimedia) from the tasks and self-reflections carried out by students.
6. Gather and analyse data from students’ interactions.