Students’ Privacy and Ethical Concerns of Using Social Virtual Worlds for Online Learning

Social virtual worlds provide students in remote online courses a unique approach to collaborative work and social interactions. However, the use of social virtual worlds in online learning raises concern about what privacy and ethical issues students might encounter. To shed light on this topic, we examined college students’ (N = 68) ethical and privacy concerns of using social virtual worlds across multiple class sessions, courses, universities, virtual environments, and technologies. Students revealed (a) struggling to manage their identity between classmates and strangers, (b) discomfort over violations of their avatars’ personal space, (c) issues of vulnerable populations experiencing harassment, nudity, and loneliness, and (d) concern over companies tracking and storing user data. In addition, students described the technological affordances that mitigated their privacy and ethical concerns. We discuss the implications of our findings for the future of collaborative learning and the design of social virtual worlds.