Can virtual reality revolutionise higher education?

Virtual reality (VR) has long been a staple of science fiction, but this year sees the release of several consumer headsets that are advanced enough to fool users’ unconscious minds into believing that they really are in another world – something called “presence” in the jargon of the industry – and largely eliminate the nausea that plagued earlier products in the 1990s.
At first, these headsets seem destined to be used largely for a hedonistic mix of gaming and virtual cinema, but a handful of academics are exploring how they can be used to teach students.
The most obvious use of VR is in subjects such as engineering or architecture, where headset-wearing students can design and manipulate virtual structures.
Conrad Tucker, an assistant professor of engineering at Pennsylvania State University, has received funding to build a virtual engineering lab where students hold, rotate and fit together virtual parts as they would with their real hands.
“What we want to do now is get down to the nuts and bolts,” he told Times Higher Education, and allow students to do things such as use screws and hammers in VR as they would in real life.
Technology to simulate physically realistic environments – where objects drop and bounce as you would expect them to – has already been developed, he explains. “You have the gaming industry to thank for this,” he adds. “It is even possible to build a car out of virtual components and have it run based on laws of physics modelled into the environment.”
One question his project aims to answer is whether students learn as well in VR as they do in real classrooms, or whether without being physically present with their classmates, they miss out on developing intangible skills such as teamwork. “We really don’t know what level of immersion can be achieved in this virtual environment,” he says.
This new generation of VR headsets is only just hitting the market, so schools and universities have not had long to assess them. However, according to a meta-analysis published in 2014, students do learn better when they are immersed in virtual worlds.
Virtual environments help students memorise material better because “you activate more of your brain since it’s not a single channel [sense]”, says Xavier Fouger, senior director at Dassault Systèmes, a company that makes 3D models and simulations. This way all students, whether they learn best visually, or through touch or hearing, will be stimulated, he argues.
Dassault Systèmes has already built virtual reality models of the Mulberry harbours used in the D-Day landings, and collaborated with Harvard University to create a 3D model of the ancient Egyptian Giza Plateau. Students can peer into now-inaccessible tombs recreated from sketches and photos made by the archaeologists who unearthed them.
The use of VR in humanities subjects like English and history may be more limited and controversial than in the likes of engineering.
For a start, the bulk of these students’ time is spent analysing texts. There is also a risk that in “recreating a lost building, for example, you might give users the idea that the virtual reality model is what really existed, though the reconstruction might be only hypothetical”, says Glenn Gunhouse, a senior lecturer in art history at Georgia State University.
Gunhouse, who has recreated a virtual version of the ancient Egyptian Tomb of Menna that his students tour using an Oculus Rift headset, thinks that one way to solve this would be to “allow users to toggle between modes, hiding and then revealing the reconstructed parts”.
Despite the obvious potential in some areas of higher education, no one THE spoke to thought that VR would replace the physical campus. It could, however, help universities to optimise their use of space, reserving real labs for when they are truly needed. – Derived from www.timeshighereducation.com