Abstract—Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, digitalization of
teaching and learning has been forced to be in place for effective
remote and online education. Most learning platforms offer
teacher-centered pedagogy and limited opportunities for
self-paced learning. This project used Gather. Town, which is
an online proximity-based video-conferencing platform with an
ability to allow student interactions and self-paced learning.
This case study aimed to evaluate Year 1 pharmacy students’
experiences and perceptions in learning through the virtual
anatomy museum visit. The virtual anatomy museum was
developed via Gather.Town and introduced to Year 1
pharmacy students from Taylor’s University, Malaysia enrolled
in Human Anatomy and Physiology module in the August 2021
semester. Student experiences and feedback were collected
using a self-administered questionnaire by using universal
sampling. A total of 61 pharmacy students participated with a
response rate of 93.9%. The majority of the students (82.0%)
actively participated during the virtual visit. More than half of
the students (52.5%) enjoyed the self-guided visit at their own
pace and this was significantly associated with their
pre-university education. The majority of students enjoyed
(93.4%) and felt motivated (77.0%) during the virtual visit.
From students’ qualitative responses, they found that the
virtual museum provides a real-world environment with a
self-paced learning mode, which helped them understand better
in anatomy lectures. This study highlighted the implementation
of virtual anatomy visit with Gather.Town platform that
enhanced the students’ visit experience in terms of their
engagement with self-paced learning. It could be used as an
alternative platform for students in visit-based learning.
Index Terms—Distance-learning, self-paced learning, student
engagement, synchronous video-conferencing.
Hui-Yin Yow is with the Taylor‟s University, 47500 Subang Jaya,
Malaysia (e-mail: huiyin.yow@taylors.edu.my).
Cite: Hui-Yin Yow, "A Case Study of Virtual Anatomy Museum: Facilitating Student Engagement and Self-paced Learning through an Interactive Platform," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 12, no. 12, pp. 1345-1353, 2022.
Copyright © 2022 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).