Abstract:

Digital learning has increased rapidly in the recent years but has primarily focused on teaching knowledge, using auditory and visual modalities. However, the use of haptic modalities has been hardly considered so far, even though it would be particularly interesting for the learning of skills and processes. Especially in the medical field, it is shown e.g., that the addition of haptic feedback in a virtual learning environment can have a positive influence on the learning of skills.

In order to take a further step towards the inclusion of haptics in teaching and learning processes, we want to give an overview of our understanding of haptic learning in this paper. We will do this by presenting our definition of haptic learning with corresponding delimitations and by introducing our model of haptic learning. The model will be explained by describing its structure with its three core areas and justifying why each of these areas is meaningful for haptic learning or why we have chosen them accordingly. This model is an attempt to relate different concepts of haptics to each other, especially the understanding of haptic learning, and to look at it from a broader holistic perspective. The aim is to make use cases in practice more describable and analyzable and to show the range of possible applications for haptic learning. Furthermore, in addition to the evaluation of use cases, it should be possible to optimize them with regard to learning effectiveness and efficiency. Also, we will have a closer look at the models’ features by which use cases can be analyzed and characterized to make haptic learning systematically describable. Based on these features some use cases will be analyzed as a next step to demonstrate their application. Finally, a summary of the paper and an outlook will be given to demonstrate the potential of our model for digital use cases of haptic learning.

Keywords:

Digital Learning, Haptic Learning, Learning Experience.