Who consumes technology, who gets affected and where does the responsibility lie: A designer-educator’s reflections on developing VR experiences for Indian classrooms
By Arundhati Mitter, Executive Director, Flow India
At a recent conference in Bangalore, I had the opportunity to hear Dr. Punya Mishra delivering a keynote on the future of learning with a lens on technology in education. Dr. Mishra, who is an associate dean and professor at the Mary Lou Fulton Teacher’s College, Arizona State University, has been working for over a decade on a framework called TPACK that ‘attempts to identify the nature of knowledge required by teachers for technology integration in their teaching, while addressing the complex, multifaceted and situated nature of teacher knowledge.’
Mulling over TPACK, I found myself evaluate and put into perspective, my own practice as a learning design strategist and thinker who has been creating and facilitating enquiry based learning programmes for close to seven years. I was essentially trying to map the virtual reality(VR) project that my team at Flow India is currently developing to understand this emerging space of global engagement with VR led learning experiences. The project we are working on attempts to create opportunities for self-directed learning around a world heritage site in India and targets middle school learners.
This project materialised as the result of prestigious grant that Flow India was awarded earlier this year. The Contemporary Take, Beyond Cultural Heritage programme grant is supported by the Prince Claus Fund and the British Council. Our project, Culture Connectors works around the idea of connecting culture in more ways than one. With this project, we are investigating the prospective creative digital communication techniques and technologies to engage young people and support them as they explore and contemplate their relation with cultural heritage. Our project goal was fuelled by a desire to foster an organic learning process that draws from reflecting on lessons learnt from a shared past, being mindful of present challenges and thinking constructively of building a symbiotic future where cultural differences co-exist and thrive.
In addition, the larger philosophical question that we as a team were unravelling for ourselves, was to understand how does a hands-on, tactile, on ground learning experience designed for a physical space be rendered into an immersive engagement in the digital realm. And in doing so, how does the learning experience design framework alter or evolve?
Over the last four months, we have been through a fairly intensive design process. Our team comprised mix of people with varied skillsets and subject expertise. Some came from academic fields like History, Psychology, Literature, Art History, some from the field of Communication Design and Strategy, some from the space of performance and yet others from the development sector. What bound us was our experience in having designed and led enquiry projects in various classroom and learning environments across India.
Understanding and developing a learning experience in virtual reality has been both challenging and enriching. Which brings me to my original reference of the premise of the TPACK — what do we need to know about technology (in this case VR) in order to use it effectively in our classrooms? We are aware of a proliferation of technology solutions in the learning landscape and take cognizance of the issues and challenges that are tabled in debates on ‘inclusion’, ‘relevance’, ‘access’ and ‘democracy’. In such a scenario, at Flow, my team and I try to be in the shoes of the teachers, who find themselves primarily in the role of consumers of these solutions and have been struggling to familiarize and keep pace with tools, interfaces, systems with each wave of innovation. It is a labour that many take solitarily, some unwillingly, others excitedly under the guidance of a motivating management but many fall by the wayside. The situation is understandable, as most teachers weren’t raised as digital natives. In such circumstances, it becomes quite challenging to gauge the benefits of a tool or be able to manipulate it to meet specific needs of stakeholders in the field of learning. There is already a rich and rapidly growing repository of VR content for a range of classroom applications. How do we arrive at our own understanding of why we should use this technology, what may best suit our learners or even how to go about introducing it?
At Flow, one of the most insightful experiences within our Culture Connectors project has been the opportunity to put ourselves in the shoes of the maker — a maker who is not only a technologist or a designer but also an educator, a facilitator, and a learner. In order to understand the technology and its applications in education, we immersed ourselves in deep research, looking at an assortment of content and how it has been used for a variety of learning goals, reading case studies of ongoing research projects across the world that are tracking the preliminary outcomes of VR led classrooms, working through studies on the health guidelines and other challenges around VR engagement and the design principles of the experience itself.




Start with why.
As an educator it is important to have clarity on why you are choosing to introduce VR in your class. In India, one is more than aware that teachers have very little autonomy in their own classrooms. However, even if the mandate is coming from upper management, it is worth investing in the ‘why’ probe. Virtual reality is an immersive medium that seems like reality to its users. What is it likely to leverage in a classroom context? It can transport you to remote locations and points in time such as historic places, events, geographical locations, or help visualize parts of systems otherwise impossible to see such as the internal parts of a human body, molecular structures of elements, workings of machines, or experiences of another being. In such scenarios, can a medium that is accentuating our senses of sight, sound and in certain cases even touch, build stronger engagement for our learners? Sampling a range of available experiences can help you build a perspective on the same.
Pegging our learner.
The point of departure for all our work starts with our learner — where is she or he at in the scale of learning, skill, opportunity? What is her or his understanding of the technology, what is her or his attitude towards learning about the past and what is her or his perspective on how VR might serve the purposes of self-growth and learning?
We recognized that capturing learner perspective on VR is quite new in India. There wasn’t much available data one could refer to. Thus our study comprised a modest dipstick study of learners in the age group of 11 to 14 years along with secondary research of ongoing international projects. Despite a limited dataset, our primary research threw up some interesting insights. We found out that children are well aware that context has an important role to play in the successful pairing of any technology with a learning goal. Though most of them had not experienced VR, they were intuitively able to point to use such as simulation of the past, exploring places that cannot be physically reached, viewing components that are otherwise difficult to visualize. With specific reference to the discipline of the Social Sciences in school, they spoke of the need to extend learning beyond the textbook using images, objects, theatre and film to build active engagement. While this got us excited, the findings from our secondary research offered a slightly deeper and cautious perspective.
Foundry 10’s ongoing research on VR in Education documents middle school learners in the US speaking about their apprehensions about how learning may undercut the joy of engaging with technology, burdening the latter with its heavy goal and purpose. They also pointed out that since VR by nature can allow for blurring of the line between reality and fiction, it is important to have open discussions on where a certain kind of content is coming from? Who is making it? Do they have an agenda? What is the agenda?
Deliberate by design.
The thrill of the technology can often overpower the learning process and method. And once the initial excitement of immersion in the new experience subsides, it can also seem mundane. A well-crafted VR experience can embed within itself a robust learning framework that speaks to specific goals for its stakeholders. However, as a maker of the experience, the toughest aspect of the work is to identify and trigger the intrinsic motivation that will encourage learners to follow through on this framework. Drawing from the Flow theory, elements of game mechanics is one component we have played with. The other is something we cast our net a bit widely to draw from. Unpacking the preferences that audiences have while engaging with cultural experiences(the IPOP framework) has been a unique reference point for us to work with. The outcome is clearly an experiment. Our learning will be reaped through every stage of the process: concept, design, implementation and scale up.
The other larger design consideration that stemmed from our research findings was: What makes the experience ‘authentic’? This has been an interesting investigation for us and I believe a documentation of it will be useful for educators. The notion of authenticity in VR design concerns itself with capturing the basic truth of what it represents in tandem with the instructional goal of the experience. Dr. Jeffrey Jacobson’s framework outlines 4 components of authenticity — Purpose, Truth, Elegance and Continuity.
Purpose speaks to defining the learning goals.
Truth speaks to the relationship with the real thing and its simulation — one that could have multiple manifestations, be it the reproduction of visual details, or the right amount of motion in the experience.
Elegance, a nuanced component, speaks to the granular balance of all elements of design that come together such that the purpose is achieved in a singular effective manner. In this context, a good learning experience in virtual reality ‘will be one that is well integrated with its environment, well coordinated with other instructional materials, sensitive to its audience, and consistent with it purpose.’
Continuity speaks to the capacity of design to craft a seamless engagement where there are no abrupt fluctuations within the experience.
However, the ultimate test of this construct of authenticity lies in the learner’s ability to demonstrate knowledge and skill transfer from the experience to real life. I believe, this is fundamental to all enquiry-based learning strategies and projects.





Charting the unknown.
The use of virtual reality in learning is a fairly new phenomenon. There are multiple ongoing studies that are trying to understand its short and long term impact on human physiology and psychology. This makes it imperative for makers to be continually abreast of the latest research and findings as the technology proliferates to find wider user base. The findings of DigiLitEY, a five year (2013–2017) academic network that focused on existing and emerging communicative technologies for young children, shed some light on core aspects that one should be mindful about. Their research focused on 3 key tests that looked at eyesight, stereo-acuity and balance. The findings guide developers to be mindful of the duration of the experience and also to keep all elements of the experience within comfortable visual reach of the child. Educators need a broad reference to these guidelines as well so they can evaluate the experiences they subscribe to for their learners.
We will be launching the Culture Connectors experience in the next few weeks and are excited to engage with practitioners who are keen to experience and explore the use of this technology in their classrooms. Do look out for our participation call-out which will be up in mid September 2018. As an experimental project, we believe the implementation phase will also witness some steep learning curves and as educators we hope to learn the right lessons from it. We have set up our project to extensively document how children engage with this experience, how effectively it speaks to enhancing learning and activating engagement with cultural environments and invite interested developers, teachers and educators to follow our journey via https://cultureconnectors.in/ and its corresponding FB page.

