Virtual Reality for Learning and Assessment
The covid-19 pandemic showed us that modern education calls for effective use of technology which needs to serve both learning and the assessment of learning. While most classrooms are still using traditional desktop and mobile applications, there has been a rise in experiments with virtual reality devices. As technology advances and VR equipment becomes affordable for broader audiences, we can expect to see virtual reality used for various educational purposes in schools, universities, and libraries.
Many researchers have shown that virtual reality can bring numerous benefits to the learning process (Hamilton et al., 2020). Particularly, educational applications in VR can be developed along with the constructivist approach to teaching — “an approach to learning that holds that people actively construct or make their own knowledge and that reality is determined by the experiences of the learner” (Elliott et al., 2000, p. 256). Virtual reality essentially allows students to experience what they are learning so that they can understand abstract concepts and learn by doing. It can help them build new skills and competencies and improve their understanding through empathy and a sense of presence.
Like traditional technology used in education, VR can be beneficial not only in learning but also in assessment. In virtual reality, we can simulate real-life situations and evaluate the students’ skills and knowledge in practice. Moreover, many teachers would surely appreciate VR’s ability to shut out the real world — not only could their students be fully present and focus on a remote exam, but it would decrease the chance of cheating on such an exam.
However, not every matter can be taught or assessed in virtual reality. Some areas of study and training are more suitable than others, and it is up to the teachers and designers of such learning sessions to consider the benefits of VR along with its limitations. In the next section, we will look at some typical uses of virtual reality in education.
What can VR bring to education?
Virtual reality can be experienced through diverse media: a 3D simulation can be displayed on a desktop computer and controlled by a mouse and keyboard or displayed in a VR headset and controlled by a user’s movement. This article will focus on immersive virtual reality at the fully virtual side of the reality-virtuality scale (P. Milgram et al.,1995) shown below.
An essential trade of immersive virtual reality is the sense of presence it gives its users — it covers their whole visual field and subjectively replaces the environment they are in. Another important trade of VR is the sense of agency — users can perform actions and affect their surroundings. The sense of presence and agency consequently influence the learning outcomes: the strength of the immersive experience and users’ ability to interact with virtual objects have an impact on their cognitive functions and engagement. (Makransky & Petersen, 2021)
Educational VR applications benefit from the sense of presence and agency and their influence on students’ learning. Now, let’s discuss some typical examples.
Understanding concepts
In a traditional human biology classroom, the students would have a physical model of the human upper body with colorful organs that they could take out and see their shape. In a chemistry or physics classroom, there would be special equipment for performing scientific experiments to demonstrate otherwise abstract concepts the students learn about. All these gadgets have the same objective: making the abstract concrete.
Virtual reality can replace many of these classroom gadgets — and add many more. Not only can the students see what organs are in a human body, but they can also go inside the organs and see how they work in detail. Or they could perform their own chemistry experiments and try even those chemical reactions that would be dangerous in real life. Thanks to VR, these experiences could be safe, engaging, and scalable.
Virtual tours
Expeditions and field trips are memorable experiences where the students see what they have been learning about with their own eyes. Virtual reality offers the possibility to bring students to expeditions more often and with a lower budget.
Via a VR headset with a 360° panorama, students can visit places on the other side of the world, or they can even visit worlds that are too small (like molecules) or too far (like other planets).
Hands-on experiences
In professional training, learners often need to master a new skill before they are allowed to perform in practice. Depending on the profession, they can practice in simulators or on models. Virtual reality can substitute the simulations and add additional value by providing guidance and instant feedback.
For example, a surgeon learning to operate a knee can put on a headset any time they want to practice and instantly move to a virtual operating room. The training software will provide them with a realistic setup, a series of tasks, and visual cues to guide them through the process.
Social VR
Learning in virtual reality does not need to be an individual activity; on the contrary, modern VR software can bring users together to a shared virtual space no matter where they physically reside.
The social aspect of virtual reality can be beneficial to learning for several reasons:
- In collaborative activities, students can support and motivate each other. Having a collaborator can “improve learning outcomes and decrease task-related anxiety.” (Šašinka et al., 2019)
- Similar to other technology, VR can help overcome physical distance — it can give us the sense of actually being together in one room with people who might as well be on a different continent.
- In certain scenarios, students can feel less exposed than in face-to-face conversation, making it easier for them to role-play.
Examples of education in virtual reality
Educational applications of virtual reality can be found in many institutions across various domains: from schools to businesses and from natural sciences to humanities. Companies use virtual reality to train their employees and to test their readiness for stressful real-life situations, while schools benefit from VR’s ability to improve the learning process and engage students.
Let’s have a look at some examples.
Environmental Studies
In environmental education, teachers and learners can use VR simulations to experience natural and environmental phenomena in controlled conditions. Instead of waiting for appropriate weather conditions and traveling to distant locations, students can practice their skills inside a VR simulation and receive direct feedback.
In an interview for VR/AR Association Seattle (2020), educational technologist at Unity College David Bass-Clark describes how they use VR in their environmental courses. In conservation scientist training, “students enter a virtual deciduous forest equipped with a laser rangefinder to locate and count a specific species and use that information to estimate that species’ population” (Unity College, 2021).
Let’s imagine a class of 15 students. In their wildlife conservation training, they would go into the forest to estimate the local population of certain species — for example, rabbits. However, they would encounter the following problems:
- A group of several people could scare the rabbits away unless the people remain silent and unnoticed.
- Even if the group remains unnoticed, they will likely see different rabbits at different times: once a rabbit gets spotted, it can quickly run away before anyone else can see it. This makes it considerably difficult for the teacher to assess students’ ability to spot the animals.
- Finally, if the teacher wants to evaluate the students, they still cannot estimate their success rate: the teacher does not know the total number of rabbits in the forest. The students may have spotted three rabbits — but was it 3 out of 5 or 3 out of 10?
To address these issues, Unity College built a forest simulation that they can populate with a predefined number of rabbits and have each student train on their own. Furthermore, the application allows the student to pause the scene when they spot a rabbit, and it tells them how many rabbits they have missed in the end. To ensure relevance to the real world, the developers designed the rabbits to mimic the behavior of real rabbits. Moreover, the number of rabbits and other properties of the simulation can be changed each time the student enters it so that they can repeatedly train and improve.
A similar approach has been applied to a training program for estimating whale populations in the ocean. Students can go on a virtual expedition to the open sea and identify diverse whale species based on their shape. Additionally, they can exercise their ability to estimate the whale’s distance, which is another skill they would need in their research practice.
Medical training
In medical training, simulations and real-life models are an effective way of preparing clinicians for practice, but their use is often limited and expensive. Virtual reality offers “cost-effective, repeatable, standardized clinical training on demand.” (Pottle, 2019)
In the training of a future dialysis technician by the company Lifeliqe, a trainee is guided through the dialysis process in virtual reality (Lifeliqe, 2020). The VR training experience begins at the clinic’s reception: the trainee first watches a short explanatory video about dialysis and learns how to interact with objects in virtual reality. Next, the trainee continues to one of the dialysis patients, where they meet a clinician who explains to them what to do. The simulation utilizes various principles to facilitate learning:
- Narrator: There is a clinician standing next to the dialyzer who guides the trainee through the whole process.
- Visual cues: While the guide explains to the trainee what to do, the simulation displays visual cues like rays, arrows, and particles, directing the trainee to perform the correct action.
- Textual cues: Actions that require the trainee’s attention are annotated with text tables.
- Interactive 3D models: For example, when the guide-clinician explains to the trainee how kidneys work, an interactive 3D model appears next to them. The trainee can see the organ and examine how each part works.
- Excursion into the dialyzer: To explain how the dialyzer works and what happens to the blood stream, the guide takes the trainee into the machine itself.
- Final assessment: After the learning session, the trainee takes a multiple-choice test that helps them revise what they have learned.
Virtual expeditions
In the previous two examples, virtual reality served for education in specific domains. In contrast, the concept of virtual expeditions can be adapted for many different fields and uses. A virtual expedition is essentially a field trip to a virtual environment that can be either fully modeled or based on 360° captures of the real world. Moreover, with the use of 360° pictures or videos, it can be relatively inexpensive and easy to produce.
A great example of a virtual tours platform is the Google Expeditions project. In 2015 and 2016, Google prototyped an affordable VR education tool and traveled around the world to test it with over 1 million students in many different countries. To go on a tour, the students would wear Google Cardboard: affordable VR goggles made out of cardboard, a pair of lenses, and a smartphone. Their teacher would be equipped with a tablet to manage the learning session, monitor the students’ activity, and pause the tour if needed. The whole classroom could see historical sights like Machu Picchu, explore wildlife in the ocean, or stand under the world’s tallest building in Dubai. (Google Developers, 2016)
In addition, anyone could produce their own tour with a Google platform called Tour Creator (available at https://arvr.google.com/tourcreator/). Users would either upload their own 360° content or use panoramas from Google Street View. A tour could be composed of multiple scenes; they could write a description to each scene and add “points of interest” with an annotation, an additional image, or even narration that would play when the point of interest was selected.
As of June 2021, Google announced they would no longer support Tour Creator, and they would move the existing content to their other platform called Google Arts & Culture.
In this article, we explored various benefits that virtual reality brings to education, and we saw several examples of its use in practice. In conclusion, virtual reality offers countless new possibilities for modern education and training. It has the power to increase students’ engagement, motivation, and understanding; however, the technology is still in its early stages, and it will take many more experiments to understand how to design for learning in VR.
References
Elliott, S.N., Kratochwill, T.R., Littlefield Cook, J. & Travers, J. (2000). Educational psychology: Effective teaching, effective learning (3rd ed.). Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill College.
Google Developers. (2016, May 21). VR in the Classroom: Early lessons learned from Google Expeditions — Google I/O 2016. Retrieved June 13, 2021, from YouTube website: https://youtu.be/UuceLtGjDWY
Hamilton, D., McKechnie, J., Edgerton, E., & Wilson, C. (2020). Immersive virtual reality as a pedagogical tool in education: a systematic literature review of quantitative learning outcomes and experimental design. Journal of Computers in Education, 8(), 1–32. https://doi.org/[10.1007/s40692-020-00169-2](https://www.notion.so/marketakucerova/10.1007/s40692-020-00169-2)
Lifeliqe. (2020, April 29). Lifeliqe VR Dialysis (v1.0) Preview. Retrieved June 13, 2021, from YouTube website: https://youtu.be/eXbh7vDR8Hk
Makransky, G., & Petersen, G. B. (2021). The Cognitive Affective Model of Immersive Learning (CAMIL): a Theoretical Research-Based Model of Learning in Immersive Virtual Reality. Educational Psychology Review. https://doi.org/[10.1007/s10648-020-09586-2](https://www.notion.so/marketakucerova/10.1007/s10648-020-09586-2)
Milgram, P., Takemura, H., Utsumi, A., & Kishino, F. (1995). Augmented reality: a class of displays on the reality-virtuality continuum. Proc. SPIE, Telemanipulator and Telepresence Technologies, 2351. https://doi.org/[10.1117/12.197321](https://www.notion.so/marketakucerova/10.1117/12.197321)
Šašinka, Č., Stachoň, Z., Sedlák, M., Chmelík, J., Herman, L., Kubíček, P., … Juřík, V. (2019). Collaborative Immersive Virtual Environments for Education in Geography. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 8(1), 3. https://doi.org/[10.3390/ijgi8010003](https://www.notion.so/marketakucerova/10.3390/ijgi8010003)
Unity College. (2021, April 23). Extended Reality (XR). Retrieved June 13, 2021, from Unity College website: https://unity.edu/about/innovation-lab/extended-reality/
VR/AR Association Seattle. (2020, November 13). Immersive Learning: XR and the Future of Education. Retrieved June 13, 2021, from YouTube website: https://youtu.be/HtaaxH6w42E
