Summary: The popularity of immersive education is growing.
But as cool and cutting-edge as the technology is, is a virtual reality
environment conducive to learning?
Barbara Mikolajczak is an information technology professor at Boston College who teaches a 4
th to 6
th
grade after-school “immersive education” class in which virtual
reality, game-based learning and immersive environments are used as
teaching techniques.
A year ago, she started adapting the popular video game Minecraft, in
which players build things, to teach her students how, for instance, to
make a torch, which they need in the game. They learn where wood, coal
and flint come from and obtain them.
“They’re going through the scientific method, essentially — okay, now
that we have all the ingredients, what amounts do we need to [make
fire]? Can we create it? Will this work? Can we repeat the process? It’s
a lot more fun for them, as opposed to a teacher saying, this is what
the process is, and reading it from a textbook,” she says. The kids get
so excited that they will holler across the lab “You gotta see what I
created!”
Since the 1990s, different forms of immersive education have crept into
the classroom, with simulations being used in medical school and the
military, and gaming, such as Minecraft, being used in K-12 to teach a
variety of subjects ranging from American history to space travel to
arts and culture. Such learning could soon reach another level with the
arrival of headsets like the Oculus Rift and Sony Morpheus, in which
students don’t look at two-dimensional screens but perceive themselves
to be in all-encompassing virtual worlds.
Aaron E. Walsh, director of the
Immersive Education Initiative,
a 7,000-member non-profit consortium of colleges, universities and
companies developing standards and best practices for virtual
reality-based learning, says though the first virtual reality headsets
came about in the 1990s, “[for] every one of these immersive
technologies, it takes decades of refinement and enhancement before it
gets to a point where it’s actually viable.” He believes the arrival of
the Oculus Rift and Sony Morpheus, both expected to be priced at a few
hundred dollars, signal the crossing of that threshold for headsets.
Over time, they could be more cost-effective, than, say, field trips.
While there are multiple hurdles to adoption of headsets in classrooms —
mainly bandwidth and price — educators are already thinking up new ways
to take advantage of such technology. One Kansas City Public Library
program funded by Google and Mozilla will launch as soon as its Oculus
Rift headsets arrive at the three library branches selected, all of
which are located in areas where resident youth tend to have little to
no connectivity in the home.
Because Kansas City is one of the cities to enjoy Google Fiber’s 1
Gigabit-per-second Internet service, the library project is meant to
showcase the capabilities of Internet that’s 100 times faster than
average broadband. It uses the combination of Oculus Rift and Minecraft
(unofficially dubbed Minecrift) to allow the students to re-imagine
their neighborhoods. The idea for the project came out of a discussion
between Marcus Brown, the digital youth engagement associate, and a
student who was wondering why his neighborhood didn’t have the sort of
upscale restaurants or shopping he saw in other areas of town.
Though the headsets haven’t arrived yet, the students are already using
Minecraft alone to build existing aspects of the community such as the
library and its environs, plus deciding on what new structures they want
to include — from hospitals to roller coasters. The headsets will be
“where they get that immersive component, so they can interact in a
first-person experience with the world, so it’ll be a community where
they’re building things up, where there’s game play involved, where
there’s goods and services exchanged,” says Brown. They will also enable
real-time interaction between remote participants in the three
branches.
But as cool and cutting-edge as the technology is, is a virtual reality environment conducive to learning?
“To harken back to Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message,” says
Rabindra Ratan,
a Michigan State University professor who studies the psychological
experience of video games and other interactive environments. “So in the
case of the Oculus Rift, there is a higher level of presence or
telepresence in the psychological experience of the medium, which is
good for learning because it makes people pay attention and directs
attention in ways that are more deliberate.”
But a headset or any kind of hardware isn’t enough on its own, he says.
Educational software must be designed to take advantage of the way the
mind learns. For instance, will the software or the game capitalize on
the concept of presence — making people feel as though certain objects
or occurrences in the environment are important for their survival? If
so, “you can use the mechanics in this world to induce attention which
leads to learning,” he says.
Another aspect that could be built into such software is called
transformed social interaction (TSI) which makes it possible for the
players in the world to interact in ways that are impossible in real
life. So for instance, to take advantage of the fact that people are
more likely to pay attention if someone is looking them in the eye, the
game can make each player feel like another player (such as the teacher)
is looking right at them, when in real life, a teacher would only be
able to hold the gaze of one student at a time.
Another way the software can use TSI is by having a teacher mimic the
head movements of the student as the student is talking, or by making
the teacher look slightly more like the student — techniques that have
been shown to make the mimicked person like the other person more.
“Social learning happens when people think they’re similar to the people
they’re learning from,” says Ratan. So, a virtual teaching environment
could use one audio track, but tailor the teacher’s movements or
physiognomy for each student.
Ratan, who researches how avatars affect behavior, said that after the
environment and social interactions, the self, in the form of an avatar,
“the medium within the medium,” can also be used to cultivate learning.
For instance, researchers have noticed what’s called a Proteus effect,
which occurs when players engage in the behaviors associated with their
avatar. For instance, people with taller avatars negotiate more
aggressively, those with attractive avatars stand closer to people in
the virtual environment, people with older avatars choose longer-term
investment portfolios, etc. So students who choose a superhero avatar
might exhibit selflessness, strength and pro-social behaviors. “We might
expect them to help out their classmates more, post study guides for
them, stuff like that,” Ratan says.
Though it’s too soon to tell, one open question is how well immersive
education can teach abstract concepts. Ratan says some research suggests
that the visual nature of virtual reality environments is good for
teaching more concrete things. “But if the environment is focused too
much on immersion at the concrete level, it might impede thinking at the
abstract level,” he says. So a virtual world might be able to show the
textures of various rocks in great detail, but too much sensory
stimulation might detract from more abstract geological concepts like
the rock cycle. However, he says some preliminary research shows that
having the virtual environment switch back and forth between concrete
representations of, say, a rock, to abstract representations of
geological concepts could facilitate abstract learning.
Indeed the inherent adaptability of virtual environments means they can
be made useful for teaching rote and creative skills, says Ratan. For
example, a virtual environment that has a tooth and a training tool is
an excellent way to learn how to practice and refine a skill like
performing a root canal. And so-called “sandbox” virtual environments,
like Minecraft and Second Life, in which people create things and there
are few prescripted rules of user behavior, are conducive to deeper,
more creative learning.
Although the Kansas City library is starting with this
community-building project, Brown has personally experienced several
other educational applications for the Oculus Rift, such as a Virtual
Museum of Harlem in which he could hear poetry readings, go to music
clubs and see artwork from the Harlem Renaissance period. Boston’s
Mikolajczak has used Minecraft to teach aspects of American history like
Boston Freedom Trail.
But ultimately, how well educators are able to take advantage of virtual
environments remains to be seen. “I could imagine a dystopian world in
which only the rich kids go on field trips, whereas the have-nots are
forced to view things in virtual environments,” says Ratan. On the other
hand, he can envision a utopian world in which virtual field trips make
education more accessible to everyone. As technology advances and the
obstacles of bandwidth and price fall away, we’ll see what happens next.
~ Laura Shin
