Teaching sports history by Mozilla Hubs

Mozilla Hubs is a virtual reality platform that can also be integrated with 3D vision devices. Mozilla Hubs is a community of free developers that have created the well-known browser Mozilla Firefox. The community aims to make the Internet an accessible environment for communication, entertainment, and training from the perspective of the Open Web. Mozilla Hubs allows users who access it to choose or build an avatar and select a virtual environment (or build it entirely) to communicate via chat and share 3D objects and videos. After considering the platform's potential, it was decided to use it for teaching sports history, an academic discipline of sports studies, in an Italian university. The research objective was to demonstrate whether the use of this platform was more effective than the traditional methods of distance learning used in Italian universities. Therefore, in the sports history course held at the University of Rome Foro Italico, Italy, in the year 2021, students were divided into two groups. To the first group of 47 students, the sports history course was delivered using the Mozilla Hubs platform. The second group was made up of 43 students, and to them, the same course was delivered using the traditional method based on the MS Teams platform and Moodle. A questionnaire was administered at the end of the course to identify the two platforms' advantages and disadvantages. In this study, the results of this case study are presented, interpreted, and discussed. The research objective was to evaluate the pros and cons of using Virtual Learning environments (VLE) in university e-learning and education and propose their use to prospective instructors and teachers.