Developing cognitive processes as a major goal in designing e-health information provider VR environment in information science education

Information science has played an important role in computer science education in the last decades. The design of storing, retrieving and interacting with information is an obligatory part in development of numerous online services in our era. Therefore, many parts of information science are elementary components in the majors' curricula in computer science education. In this paper, we focus on a course on Information Architecture where students were introduced to the basics of information science. During the course, MaxWhere - an online virtual reality collaborative service - was used as a framework. In our research, our main goal was to develop the students' cognitive processes. The students' main task was to design and develop ehealth services in virtual reality (VR) environment for impressing and persuading their future target audience to live a more environmentally conscious life or to live healthier. In this paper, we present some results of this experimental research: Students were motivated to create and design an inclusive project together that needed more work and knowledge from them than it had been planned. They were motivated to collaborate with their groupmates and a self-driven collaborative workflow was developed. They had to learn about the MaxWhere 3D VR system, and at the same time, they had to start to do research on their own projects. After a while, they found gaps in their designs that they wanted to fill in. As a consequence, the students had to deal with some theory and practice of marketing, e.g., they had to deal and work with buyer personas, with some other marketing aspects, and - of course - with some important parts of information science. They had to imagine their future customers and to develop VR environments for them that could have an impact on the users' behavior and lives. The design and development process resulted in and showed development in the students' cognitive processes.