Abstract:

With the relatively recent growth in Virtual Reality (VR) for educational purposes, our team at the Open University has been creating various VR applications in order to explore the affordances of teaching in this medium.

VR can be well-suited for learning because of its increased levels of immersion and propensity for experiential activities, however, VR has kept most of its core funding and expertise located centrally around its native gaming industry, with most advancements in VR interactions and use cases coming from this sector. As such, little heed has been paid to the needs of education, particularly distance education providers such as ourselves, wherein not much guidance exists around how to properly design VR for learning (Ritz and Buss, 2016).

In this session, we will present some of the problems faced by teaching in VR and how to overcome them based on what we have learned from our exploratory projects. We will focus on the pedagogical challenges faced by learning designers working in VR and how these are often overshadowed by the appeal and novelty of VR. We will also look at how we are managing to scale VR to our distance students, in spite of the associated costs.

Our work in this area has resulted in a more practical assessment of teaching in VR aimed at helping those who wish to explore the medium but have certain concerns around its effectiveness, relevance and cost. The aforementioned results attempt to bridge the gap in theory and practice (Parong and Mayer, 2018) and will be presented in the form of our ‘suitability toolkit’ which we will share with session participants via our website.

Participants will come away from the session with a better understanding of the benefits and constraints of teaching in VR. They should also feel more confident in knowing how to overcome certain pedagogical challenges, as well those relating to scalability, accessibility and interaction. Participants will be able to access our toolkit and use it as a reference point for navigating some of the more costly hurdles of getting started with VR.

Our projects have been incrementally developed, drawing on low risk pilots and evaluation to enhance our understanding of best practice, and we will continue to develop and iterate our work as we share our findings with colleagues.

References:
[1] Ritz, L.T. and Buss, A.R. (2016) A Framework for Aligning Instructional Design Strategies with Affordances of CAVE Immersive Virtual Reality Systems. TechTrends, 60(6), pp. 549-556. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-016-0085-9
[2] Parong, J and Mayer, R.E. (2018) Learning Science in Immersive Virtual Reality, Journal of Educational Psychology. Advance online publication. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/edu000024

Keywords:

Virtual Reality, Distance Learning, Technology Enhanced Learning, Best Practice.