Virtual Reality in the Higher Education Classroom!

1st March 2021

Virtual Reality in the Higher Education Classroom! Join our V-SENSE colleague, Gareth Young, and explore our innovative Immersive Learning Project for students!

We are currently extending and building upon our previous work by exploring emergent learning practices and demonstrating workflows that create unique, virtual learning environments (VLEs) for modern social virtual reality platforms.

Increasingly, online digital platforms are becoming meeting places for students and teachers to discuss and collaborate on a diverse range of academic subjects and practices. Moreover, in response to the recent global COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a heightened focus on providing readily accessible educational resources that harness traditional virtual learning environments and more socially orientated platforms. The emergence of social virtual reality software presents higher education institutes with innovative and alternative modalities for engaging with students and teaching materials in general. In particular, these types of virtual realities can help facilitate both telepresence and immersion, allowing students and teachers to feel as if they are present in a classroom and supporting the perception of being present in this non-physical world with others. These factors allow the learner to see, hear, and potentially feel the virtual classroom experience in remote learning contexts.

“Moving traditional teaching materials online is an understated and often difficult task that requires training and expertise to deliver not only effective lesson plans but to guarantee the enhanced student experiences of being part of a higher education establishment. Our research illustrates these factors’ precise role in providing educational content for more embodied learning practices. In the context of higher education, research, and creativity, we hope to gain direction from the reports of experts and learners alike on the impact of the new “virtual classroom”; with particular focus on the accessibility of educational materials, the embodiment and presence of the student within the virtual learning environment, and the influences of immersion and presence on the overall university experience. We hope that our findings will offer researchers and educators insight into student/teacher experiences with novel technologies in socio-constructive exercises that can transition seamlessly between online, offline, and immersive contexts for higher education learning.”

Please see here for the full outline of Gareth’s innovative research: https://v-sense.scss.tcd.ie:443/research/6dof/immersive-learning/ and here