7.3 Discussions
7.3.2 Challenges of VR Application in Education and Future Directions
as the setting, learning contents, and manipulating disparities, which also may be the reasons why the conclusions of some current researches are contradictory.
7.3.2 Challenges of VR Application in Education
7.3.2.1 From the Perspective of Product Technologies
Control the Devices’ Cost and Strengthen Compatibility: Generally speaking, the cost of VR devices is relatively high at present, especially those devices which are fully-immersing through helmets. The output devices with high accuracy like the VR helmets are too heavy to carry for a long time. The cost of this technology has been constantly decreasing with the development of more and more VR products. Nevertheless, it is necessary to develop more portable and cheaper devices in order to widely spread and apply VR technology in education.
Furthermore, VR devices should be connected with modern communication ter- minals including smart phones and pads to apply intofields like mobile learning.
Improve Environment Simulations: The highly immersive VR technology has a strict requirement for the simulations of its learning environment. Only by improving the VR simulations both in scene setting and operating experience can the students achieve deep understanding under the natural sematic state in the near-real learning environment. Some users will feel dizzy when they are using VR products currently, especially after a long-time use, mainly due to incompatibility between the VR visual stimulus and the self-sense stimulus of the users. Therefore, it is needed to further improve the accuracy and reaction speed of the VR products and try to reduce the delay of visual stimulus. Besides, most of the current VR systems are still only focusing on offering visual and auditory information. But it is Table 7.7 (continued)
Categories Challenges Profiles
Learners’ experience
7. The reduction of difficulty in using technology
To provide relevant trainings for teachers and students about technology use and operation. Also, the expansibility of products should be improved and the users are allowed to edit and regulate the content by themselves
8. Adapting to identity transformation and promoting identity
To help students adapt to the identity transfer in the VR environment better and to further motivate the learners’interests in
participating in learning activities through improving the identity of virtual avatars 9. The protection of the privacy and
data of users
In the open VR platforms, the protection and security of personal information matters a lot. The industrial standards about product development and opening should be regulated
Comprehension 10. The integration of technology and the applicable smart learning environment
To strengthen the compatibility of VR and other education technologies, VR learning environments and the real learning environments. Also, toflexibly use various technologies in teaching to create the optimized smart learning environment based on teaching goals
only by presenting various feedback including the sense of touch, force and smell can the students generate the sense of immersion to the different aspects of the learning objects, improving the comprehensive simulations of VR environments.
Improve the Interaction Experience: Although interaction is another eminent feature of VR technology, the interaction experience of the current VR learning system still needs to be improved. On the one hand, the interaction experience between the users and the systems needs to be enhanced from the perspective of technologies, allowing the users to manipulate and control the VR environment and the objects in it in a more natural way. On the other hand, the tools for social communication between individuals in VR learning systems have a limited range, with the traditional verbal information as the major form of interaction. Although some non-verbal information can be presented through body movements and facial expressions of virtual avatars, the effectiveness of these communication cannot be compared with social interaction in a real environment. Thus, besides improving the more natural interaction between humans and devices and environments, VR technology needs to be expanded with more social tools for convenient real-time communication, supporting the cooperation among various users.
7.3.2.2 From the Perspective of Teaching Application
Certify System Content and Teaching Strategy: Thefirst issue that needs to be considered in teaching application is what to be taught and how to teach it with VR technology. Though VR technology has the potential of being applied in numerous disciplines, this technology’s advantages can only be fully present and the learning effects can only be optimized by specifying the suitable application scale and teaching objects. This makes clear the principles of presenting and constructing VR environments and developing and designing more abundant VR system content matching the teaching requirement. However, there is still a lack of systematic and mature methodology in rendering VR technology to teach. The effective teaching contents and strategies need to be further explored in the VR environment tofind out how to present the knowledge from textbooks in the environment, how the students study by themselves in the VR environment, and how the teachers guide the students in the VR environment.
Avoid Cognition Overload: The amount of multi-channel information carried in the VR environment will deliver pluralistic information to the users, which causes an overload in cognition and this affects learning outcomes if designed inappropriately. The students may be distracted by the numerous functions and simulated scenes of the VR world, disturbing their attention from the objective learning contents. The students’ sense of presence can be strengthened by the pluralistic information, but the delivery of information can also be repetitive and redundant, causing a waste of cognition resources. The construction of VR learning environment is different from other stimulation environments created for enter- tainment and games, because the ultimate aim of a VR learning environment is to deliver knowledge and to make students devote their limited recognition resources
into the activities that have direct connections with the learning objects. Therefore, the element of cognition load should be taken seriously in the construction of VR learning environments. The design of all scenes and the presence and organization of learning materials should follow the cognition process of the students, avoiding cognition overload in learning. For example, the influence of VR to the cognition process and learning outcomes, such as the number and layout of the objects in the environment, the organization and presence of pluralistic media (such as sound, words, images, animations), and the level of knowledge of the learners should be considered.
Supervise and Evaluate the Learning Effects: When applied in actuality, the VR helmet will create a fully-immersive learning environment in which the teachers cannot distinguish students’learning states according to the traditional behaviors and reactions (like the expressions of distraction and confusion), making it difficult for teachers to control the teaching process instantly. Thus, more auxiliary tech- nologies should be involved in the VR system to help track, record and evaluate the learning behaviors better, providing the feedbacks of learning effects for the stu- dents and teachers. As for teaching research, it is a necessity to conduct experiments with strict control and select the available effect indexes. This will contribute to implementing empirical researches focusing on teaching effects in VR environment with different learning objects and teaching methods. Furthermore, it is necessary to conduct long-term longitudinal studies to examine the long-term effect of learning outcomes in VR environments and explore whether it is possible to transfer what students learn into the tasks in real environment.
7.3.2.3 From the Perspective of Dimension of Learners’Experience
Reduce the Difficulty of Using Technology: As it is a new and complicated technology, a VR system requires users to adapt to the particular ways of operation, which may be difficult. To ensure using the VR technologyfluently in classes, the teachers should be trained about the technology to guide the students and solve the problems of using it. Meanwhile, the students should also receive some relevant training courses and practices before using the VR system to guaranteefluent use and reduce the overload brought by the technology itself. In addition, considering the poor expansiveness of most current VR products, users cannot edit and regulate the contents according to their own needs, causing some inconvenience in practical application.
Adapt to Identity Transformation and Promote Identity: The virtual identity created by the students in a VR environment may have differences with the real one, which will decrease the students’ sense of identity. The identity will affect the students’ learning motivation in social environment. VR is a social stimulation environment with a high interaction, especially in the multi-user virtual platforms, in which the students will notfinish their learning tasks and interact with others if they lack the sense of identity. Therefore, in character design for virtual environ- ments, it is necessary to consider how to help students adapt to the identification
transformation and further stimulate their interests in participating in virtual learning activities through promoting identity. In the future, researchers can study the principles for the learners to use virtual avatars and the ways the avatars affect the learning effects. For example, it can be studied whether students prefer to use avatars which are close to the real identity or close to the ideal self. Moreover, it can be researched how the characteristics of virtual characters affect the social inter- action between them and the students, and how the students perceive the infor- mation delivered from avatars.
Protection for the Privacy and Data of Users: The issue of personal privacy is taken seriously by the educators of K-12 when applying VR technology (Dawley, 2009). The protection of the user’s privacy, especially the privacy of the under-aged, needs thorough attention in VR platforms that are widely open.
Currently, there is no adequate industrial standards for the development and opening of VR products and the relevant education products.
Taking the three dimensions into account, the last challenge of applying VR technology in education is the technology integration of it, including promoting the compatibility between VR technology and other education technologies and between the VR environment and the actual learning environment. “VR plus education”is a kind of education tool rather than a new education method, which contributes to the traditional teaching mode instead of substituting traditional classes. The current VR products lack the standards for open design, which will cause some problems for the users who want to integrate other education tech- nologies and teaching resources. It is worth studying how to combine VR tech- nology and other education technologies, how to connect perfectly the VR environment and the actual learning environment, and how to make VR contents cover different disciplines. The aim of discussing and researching VR technology is to better meet the teaching requirements and create an optimized smart learning environment based on specific learning goals, where all kinds of technologies can beflexibly exploited.
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Case Studies of Immersive Learning
Virtual Reality as an Immersive Medium for Authentic Simulations
The Case of EcoMUVE
Chris Dede, Tina A. Grotzer, Amy Kamarainen and Shari J. Metcalf
Abstract This chapter describes a design strategy for blending virtual reality (VR) with an immersive multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) curriculum developed by the EcoLearn design team at Harvard University for middle school students to learn ecosystems science. The EcoMUVE Pond middle grades cur- riculum focuses on the potential of immersive authentic simulations for teaching ecosystems science concepts, scientific inquiry (collaborative and individual), and complex causality. The curriculum is inquiry-based; students investigate research questions by exploring the virtual ecosystem and collecting data from a variety of sources over time, assuming roles as ecosystems scientists. The implications of blending in VR for EcoMUVE’s technical characteristics, user-interface, learning objectives, and classroom implementation are discussed. Then, research questions for comparisons between the VR version and the“Classic”version are described.
The chapter concludes with generalizable design heuristics for blending MUVE-based curricula with head-mounted display immersion.
Keywords Immersive authentic simulation
Ecosystems science Scientific inquiry Complex causalityMulti-user virtual environment Virtual realityC. Dede (&)T.A. GrotzerA. KamarainenS.J. Metcalf
Harvard Graduate School of Education, Harvard University, 13 Appian Way, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
URL: https://www.gse.harvard.edu/faculty/christopher-dede T.A. Grotzer
e-mail: [email protected] A. Kamarainen
e-mail: [email protected] S.J. Metcalf
e-mail: [email protected]
©Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017
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