Thank you for your thought provoking stop on our blog book tour. You bring up many interesting issues, not the least of which is, “how do designers fit into the 3D design process?” I think you are right that ID is not going away but that some difference sensibilities are going to be required of designers.

Those sensibilities will be built on the back of the research questions you ask, for example when is it better to have an avatar or a mobile application. These are the broad sort of questions that research can help address. As UX becomes critical to, not just instruction, but people’s experiences in general, how can instructional designer meld some of what they do into good and instructive design?

Finally, your last point about evaluation and rubrics is, in my opinion, right on the money. We do not advocate the use of virtual immersive environments to get the same results as we get in a 2D environment, you can’t test the new methods with old evaluations. Instead, have a live performance-bases assessment and compare those outcomes. Measure actual performance not memorization.

These are interesting research questions and ones I hope many will take up as we move into the era of Virtual Immersive Environments for learning.

Thanks again for your insightful and thought provoking comments.