Abstract:

Even though the “metaverse” is just a vision at present, virtual reality (VR) is indeed an opportunity for schools, especially for secondary school students, to experience new scenarios of distance education. Drawing on Virtual Reality environments, INDIRE - Italian National Research Institute for Educational Documentation Innovation - launched a pilot project focused on the practice of Debate in VR. Ten upper secondary schools were involved, covering the different geographical areas of Italy (Northern, Central and Southern Italy). Schools were selected from the community of the Educational Avant-garde Movement, a national network for innovation, founded by INDIRE in 2014 and encompassing at present over 1,400 schools.

A special VR environment, with all Debate features, was designed by H-Farm, an Italian company developing innovative software for Meta Quest viewers. The scenario of use was similar to Debate national tournaments, with students from different schools debating remotely, via their avatars. There were at least 5 challenges each week, so that each school was engaged in at least one weekly challenge. The pilot covered 4 weeks, from October to November 2022. One important issue was the involvement of all the class students and not only of debaters. In order for everybody to see the Debate performance, VR meetings were broadcasted on the IWBs or on classroom screens.

As for the Debate format, the research team, together with the teachers involved, decided to adopt the World School Debate Championship format. However, in order to be compliant with the specialists’ recommendations as for exposure time thresholds, the WSDC format was simplified, both in timing and structure: the rounds’ time was cut to 3’ (1,5’ as for the rebuttal) and POIs (Points of Information) were not included. As for the Debate assessment, WSDC criteria were considered (content, style and strategy as dimensions) by the 2 or 3 adjudicators - teachers and researchers - participating with their VR viewers.

The research objectives are to investigate the possibility of using VR in Debate practice in schools as a regular classroom activity and to adjust - or even invent - a specific format for VR Debate, considering its own peculiar properties, which will be the focus of the following research phases. The research methodology of this pilot is qualitative and uses direct observations in the virtual environment, video annotation on clips taken in VR and in the classrooms during Debate sessions, interviews with teachers, questionnaires to students and focus groups.

Preliminary results indicate that the experience of Debate in VR, as designed in this experimentation, although improvable, is feasible in schools, as for technological and organizational levels, since all the meetings were successfully managed and the matches completed. From an educational point of view, when compared with the physical setting, the virtual setting for Debating turned out to have a greater influence on dimensions such as the cognitive dimension (the level of concentration of the participants increases) and the potential involvement of all students during a competition session (not only are debaters directly involved in the match but also the rest of the classmates is highly engaged).

Keywords:

Virtual Reality, Immersive Learning, Debate.