Education in VR: will it be any different?

I think the strength in education in VR lies in the fact that you (the teacher / developer) can show a player whatever you want, without cost and without worrying about the laws of physics, and yet it still counts as an "in-person" experience. This should enable a lot of implicit learning, and learning something that is simultaneously reinforced by a bunch of related things that can be observed at the same time, as well as addressing a few of the downsides of classroom learning.

If a student opens a page in the textbook to a picture and a discussion of Mars, the student can read and learn a lot from that, but by itself it is missing spatial context and the "how did I get here" experience to reinforce what the page is telling this student. A well-structured curriculum in today's education will usually provide a general context, perhaps going through planets in order, bringing up props in a classroom to demonstrate scale and spatial relationships from a distance. And finally, the best thing about a classroom is a human teacher that can answer questions that may arise, and the teacher possibly knows the student relatively well, so answers can be tailored to provide maximum clarification.

The downsides to typical classroom learning include:

• One teacher, many students -- not all questions can be asked / answered, not all students can be directly engaged


• Teacher must have access to props, and must have time to set them up -- budget & time constraints


• These props must physically fit inside the classroom -- if you're going to bring a prop of the Sun into the classroom, then all the planets will be really small and while this will drive the point home of the Sun vs planets, it does limit how closely you can look at the small planets themselves!


• Every student learns at a different rate, or learns in different ways, or wants to learn different things at different times -- in a classroom, learning is structured but ultimately isn't self-paced, leaving some students struggling with attention issues, catch-up via homework, etc.


• If a student has special needs, it can be difficult or socially embarrassing to have help with that in the classroom along with other students. I grew up with a hearing loss, and would have greatly benefited from an interpreter or a notetaker for every single class, but having an adult sitting next to you / in front of you, signing and/or showing you their notes as they are taking them was far worse for me than missing a few words and trying to put 2 and 2 together later at home.


• Time spent on commute -- typically both students and parents lose time out of their day to physically transport the student to the classroom environment, usually via a dangerous form of travel.


• Limited field trips -- typically only one field trip is done in a day, and usually once every few weeks, and requires permission from parents. And then, what happens on that field trip itself is not entirely under the teacher's control, nor is it cheap.

Upsides to classroom learning environment:

• Social -- competition, friendship, comedy relief, buddying up to learn stuff after class, etc


• One teacher to follow the curriculum -- single point of focus for attention.


• Student learns more than just the curriculum -- breaks between class can provide life lessons, etc.


• Physical props -- whiteboard, tablets, chemical experiments, animal dissection, physics demonstrations, etc


• Pressure to keep up and make the grade -- keeps the students focused.


• I'm sure there's quite a few more I'm forgetting!

So the question then becomes, can education in VR address the downsides while maintaining the upsides?

Obviously the social component will take a while to mature to a point where it compares to a live classroom environment, but you could still have text or voice chatting on the side, achievements, and competition -- all of which are done regularly in today's games and social apps. That wouldn't be anything weird or new.

For the rest of it, it seems like VR brings the opportunity to delete a few of the downsides of education, and to augment quite a few of the upsides. Imagine a VR "classroom" environment with subtitles in any language, with "asynchronous multiplayer", the VR teacher is almost entirely engaging the player directly and could still be operated by one or more live human teachers, props and environments are cheap to build and free once built (and doesn't matter how big or small they are, where they are, or if they even exist).

I think education in VR will be taken very seriously once it's shown to produce results, keep students happy and engaged, and employ a lot of teachers. It'll be a while but the path to that point is getting clearer and clearer.

The army has been using immersive simulations for a long time for education. We humans learn faster when we truly experience things.

I agree with everything Drash said. Also his Titans of Space demo is a great example what VR can accomplish. I experienced the scale and size of other planets and stars and this leaves a lasting impression. A book or a presentation simply can not achieve this.

We have to let go of the old paradigms of education and push experiential learning forward. Given Facebook bought Oculus and many startups work on social applications for VR I think the social experience will play an important role as well. Imagine homeschooling with VR when your Chemistry teacher takes you onto a journey inside H2O.

Add in some gamification and you have your whole class trying to build the H2O compound all together.

Yes, the wow factor will fade at some point but the immersion will remain.

I think the study will be more immersive and therefore the lesson will have more impact. Especially if used as a supplement along with more traditional lessons. VR definitely has the potential to add to a learning experience. I look forward to the day when I can stroll through a scientifically accurate Cretaceous swamp to observe a herd of T Rex. That sure beats the book I had as a kid showing a T Rex standing (for size comparison) next to a city bus.

I've been playing around with this idea of developing a decent VR experience for learning and have found that the "experience" aspect blows away traditional lecture. Granted, the data could be skewed by the "new tech" aspect, but the kiddos I'm working with have shown some cool results.

One thing I tried was talking to them about planets.They understood on a basic level, but the discussions I had with them after weren't much more than repeating facts. The knowledge was there, but it wasn't anything remotely practical. However, once I fired up Titans of Space those kids wouldn't shut up haha. Any conversation on the topic after the fact saw a true understanding of the subject matter and brought up some great questions and logical reasoning that one on one tutoring simply did not.

Now I'm working on a demo to give kids a sense of scale. Seeing a scroll through on youtube is cool and all, but the experience of it all is lacking. Instead, I want kids to see what it would be like standing next to a dinosaur, or the curiosity rover, or being the size of a dust mote and seeing a pencil. I mean, logically we can know that "yeah, it'll be bigger" but the experience leaves a lasting impression.

If anyone has any ideas for how to experiment with learning retention in a quantifiable sense, send me a message! I'd love to get some hard data to look over to improve the landscape of VR-ducation.

Yep, it would be pretty fun to take an animated-VR trip to the 1500s then to simply read about it. I personally believe it would change everything about education.

I think the key point to retention is interest. Why are movies so successful and why can we recite many lines from them and why are some movies we see we can't remember a line from at all, and some inspire new ideas.
I think you should approach it in the same way. first break down what you want the student to learn. then build a story. have characters the in the virtual space that people will care about. do it episodically so that past lessons learnt can be reintroduced in later story telling. key action sequences where you want to inject the key information to be absorbed and then later discussed. Either way you have to make the person care and be invested, and at the end of the day that isn't always in the hands of the teacher or method of educating.

will any school invest in the production value needed to create something that will have an impact...probably not.

when I was in school I really saw it as a day care center I wasn't interested in anything, when i really focused I could do the work but just didn't know what I wanted to do for an end goal as far as future job. after school finished in my twenties I got my first (real)computer. then bam it all made sense and i couldn't stop absorbing information everything from 3d modeling to programming. Obviously if this is regards to higher education (college, university etc...) then the students have an idea of what they want and are there for a reason, so they wouldn't have my issue. anyway that's my 2 cents.

For some primary and secondary schools, quite a number of students are bad in discipline and could get roughly with fragile VR hardware. You can be sure its costly to maintenance when I heard most students damages headphones' cable frequently. Therefore, mobile phone HMD is a better choice.

I would be concern with safety issues, if the pieces of cracked lens went into the students' eyesight?

It will be up to Ministry of Education to run a trial or pilot test at least.
At best, argumented reality is more suitable for most contents and low barrier for educations that already use iPad.

I see huge potential for VR in education simulations.

Here is a VR demo on the use in science education, which I now use for learning and teaching biotech/biology:
viewtopic.php?f=28&t=18773&p=232513#p232513

And a video demo here:

I believe that VR will result in better test scores and better information retention AND I'm involved with a project right now that will test this. It's been pretty exciting so far. :D

The project (read experiment) is being conducted at a local elementary school and involves two 3rd grade classes (40 students). Both classes are studying the same lesson plan which involves reading, science and math, only one class is also using the Oculus to explore the lesson. We have given both classes a pre-test, they will both take a post-test and then we will follow up in a month for a follow-up test.

We believe the Oculus class will test better in both the post-test and the follow-up test. If the data supports our theory, we will conduct a larger test (with about 200 students) this fall.

Today was 'Day 1' of the lesson and everything went great. The kids were very excited and loved the experience.