All work and no play? The design and development of a virtual social space (VSS) to support distance learning students

The disappearance of physical social spaces from today's society is seen by some scholars to be a modem phenomenon, resulting in increasing isolation and lack of socialisation. In fact, this is always the case in distance education, due to geographical dispersion and disparate time schedules of learners. Very often, peer-to-peer socialisation in distance education only occurs as part of formal teaming activities, or is just left to the student's own initiative. This situation is then compounded by the modularity of VLEs, forcing students to jump from one module space to another as they progress through a course. All discussion threads, conversations or record of previous dialogues are then lost. This paper describes the design and development of a virtual social space (VSS) to resolve this predicament and support the creation of a learning community for a Continuing Professional Distance Education (CPDE) Masters in IT Management programme.