Assessing the current position of the IHAP VR walls

Following on from my previous work in VR and immersive learning:

• Virtual Reality wall
• Exploring a pedagogical rationale for VR and immersive learning
• Enabling positive Virtual Reality and immersive learning adoption: a journey of integrating VR walls
• TILT Virtual Reality and Immersive Learning practice and scholarship group
• What is Immersive Learning and VR?

To start progress on one of my self-designed 2023/2024 appraisal objectives.  Which is to scale up the pedagogical and technical use of our, Institute of Health and Allied Professions (IHAP) VR suites through colleague collaboration by July 2024.  Two outputs of which are:

• “Develop a process and guidance to enable academics and clinical skills technicians to engage and work with me on co-designing, ideating and prototyping on immersive learning design
• Exploit intermediate and advanced functionality of our VR walls, and promote and train academics and clinical skills technicians using them, producing appropriate guidance and resources”

Following my previous efforts to integrate and scale up the VR suites during 2022-2023, wider department uptake has not been that successful.  Paramedicine lecturers and students remain the most frequent users.  This was mainly due to my own staff resource and time to work with nursing and other early adopter paramedicine lecturers, to explore and exploit further potential of the technology.  But now that I have a colleague and operate as a small team, I am now able to spend some quality time on this piece.  In order to assess the current position and usage, I designed a survey by way of building my capacity to support lecturers and clinical skills technicians to use our VR immersive rooms more effectively.  With the view of offering meaningful support and collaborative approaches.  The survey questions aim to gather insights into lecturers and technicians technical and practice abilities in using the technology, including wider information on attitudes and blockers helping to identify specific knowledge gaps and areas for improvement.  22 responses were received by 31 January 2024.  Below is the Microsoft Forms summary providing an overview of the collective response - no formal report required, this is to obtain the information I need to progress my developments with.  As I suspected, it is evident that the following is lacking, in no particular order; curriculum alignment, protected development time, room size, immersive pedagogy and technical know-how (revisit basics, continue in-person and hands-on, time to cover basic troubleshooting, finding and selecting appropriate media, continue to conclude with pedagogical conversation).  I'm particularly interested in the gap of immersive learning design knowledge and skills in utilising our immersive rooms and facilities.  A deeper dive on the outcomes is now required to embed in the planning of my approaches.  Some relevant response extracts:

• Farai Pfende, Senior Lecturer in Learning Disabilities Nursing – “Look forward to any CPD to help build confidence, understanding. I am not sure I can ever create this stuff independently but willing to have a go.  Protected time is the biggest challenge at the moment but working on it.”
• Gruia Dimcea, Lecturer in Paramedicine Science - “Ongoing best-practice sharing; step-by-step video set-up guides with common FAQ's included and troubleshooting.”
• Anna Price, Clinical Skills Technician – “If the system worked as it should, it would perhaps encourage others to use the VR suite and therefore increase knowledge and confidence.”
• Adam Chillman, Senior Lecturer in Mental Health Nursing – “Thank you for you help using the rooms!”

To weave into my response to this, I am going to explore the use of storytelling and the connected use of physical props and digital objects to enhance immersive learning experiences.  The IHAP digital learning strategy that I have produced also responds to this has a number of objectives is to develop scholarly initiatives to increase knowledge and practice, and scope out opportunities to develop low level immersive experience to build upon.  As well as utilising knowledge acquired from the TILT VR and Immersive Learning Practice and Scholarship group.

What is Immersive Learning and VR?

As part of the TILT Virtual Reality and Immersive Learning practice and scholarship group, for this current academic year members agreed to develop a Thrive learning pathway.  Thrive is Nottingham Trent University's Learning Experience Platform (LXP) that is a staff-facing online learning environment to deliver organisational essential learning and Continuing Professional Development.  I produced the following outline with contributions from members on the section 'Issues addressing'.

In meeting 3 of the group, members were invited to volunteer and contribute towards our first agreed collective output.  Myself and a colleague took on the sections 'What is VR and immersive learning' and 'Types of Immersive Technologies'.  But as 'Benefits/pitfalls' wasn't taken, I suggested I bring this under my section that I took on to produce; 'What is VR and immersive learning'.

I wrote this scholarly section myself rather than using generative Artificial Intelligence, as one of the main drivers of this group was to support my own understanding and practice in this specialist area.  To feed into my context and initiatives in higher education healthcare curriculum.  To best develop my knowledge is to learn through my own learning preferences of learn by doing and by producing something, which takes me through my own internal cognitive processes.  Below is what I drafted up and first published here as the primary author, before any changes were made by members.  I structured the piece around the following: definitions, benefits, challenges and opportunities.

Introduction

Immersive learning and Virtual Reality are complex, challenging and time and resource intensive to design.  Understanding on this topic and subsequent support and guidance are required in order to build confidence and competence for those wanting to design such innovative learning experiences.

In this first section, you will be introduced to what Immersive Learning and Virtual Reality is, including Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality and Extended Reality.  Followed by the key benefits to what these modalities offer to educational experiences, and the potential challenges and opportunities they present (Scott, 2024).

Defining Immersive Learning and Virtual Reality

Immersive Learning (IL) often involves, students and academics in this context, to engage and interact with a hands-on educational experience that enables and/or stimulates natural human senses (MacDowell & Lock, 2022).  IL enables educational experiences to “transcend physical space limitations to create educational opportunities that would not otherwise be physically possible” (Dick, 2021).

Immersive technology supports such experiences to be created, and therefore relates to the technical capacity to create virtual, augmented and mixed reality learning opportunities.  Virtual Reality (VR) often involves exploring and navigating a digital world, typically using a VR headset to maximise the immersion experience (MacDowell & Lock, 2022).  VR enables students and academics to experience realistic or imaginary digital environments and interactable digital objects within them.   An immersive experience allowing them to resonate emotionally and physically to what they are seeing, hearing, smelling/tasting or touching (Clark, 2022).  There are five potential VR types (Chalmers 2017: MacDowell & Lock 2022):

1. Immersive – an environment, physical or digital, that enables and/or stimulates human visual, auditory, smell/taste and tactile senses.
2. Non-immersive – multimedia and computer-generated environments and objects displaying through hardware such as computers, televisions or projectors.  Which don’t particularly enable and/or stimulate greater use of human senses.
3. Interactive – an environment, physical or digital, where the user is able to control and change, digital or non-digital, objects or environmental characteristics, through hardware such as keyboards, VR headsets, body tracking devices etc.
4. Non-interactive – an environment physical or digital,  where the user is unable to affect any control or change in, digital or non-digital, objects or environmental characteristics.  A passive experience with no ability to make action.  Hardware is still used, such as VR headsets, speakers, and visual displays.
5. Non-computer generated – use of remote-controlled vehicles, drones or 360 camera footage (specialist or mobile phone capabilities), still image or video, to explore environments, and captured to later use in other VR and AR applications.  Which can then be utilised for immersive, non-immersive, interactive or non-interactive environments.

Augmented Reality (AR) enables the real world to be explored with a digital layer to create the illusion of a digital 3D interactive object.  Mixed Reality (MR) progresses from just a digital overlay to where virtual objects can interact with real world physical objects.  Extended Realities (XR) is often used as overarching catch-all term to encompass all immersive technology modalities (MacDowell & Lock, 2022).

Key benefits

The most common listed below, in no particular order:

• Improved knowledge; critical thinking and problem-solving skills, decision-making and testing knowledge within the scenarios.  Encouraging and embedding higher order thinking and developing contextual understanding.
• Inspires innovative and pragmatic approaches to learning and improves learning outcomes.
• Enhances and transforms traditional role play-type activities.
• Ability to make mistakes in a safe and low stakes environment.  Developing and testing approaches, behaviours and responses.
• Appropriate for students that prefer to learn through experiential-based learning type modalities e.g. practice, investigation and collaboration.
• Ability to experience and respond to situations in environments that are a challenge to access due to logistics, costs and safety.  Leading to improved preparation knowledge and skills to respond to situations in those environments.

Challenges/considerations

The most common listed below, in no particular order:

• Level of understanding on the principles of effective learning design for immersive learning experiences.
• Lecturer-to-curriculum content connection and alignment, and identifying what is possible (low or high bar) with available technology.
• Time, resource and sometimes cost intensive to pedagogically design an immersive experience and technically set up/configure required hardware and software, and involve required stakeholders to support it.
• Develop pedagogical guidelines, policies and best practices and communities of practice to ensure immersive technologies are used safely, effectively, and to their full potential.  Presented in a palatable format for the intended audience to understand.
• Facilitator training to develop confidence and competence in using selected immersive technology/ies, respond to basic troubleshooting and ability to support others in using it.  Engaging in purposeful play and experimentation, and invite others to join in and share ideas can help.
• User (student) induction (training) and/or play/exploration of VR environment and technology before going live in or on a real time-bound activity.
• Facilitating group participation, including large group sizes and size of space, and identifying suitable locations to host the immersive learning.  Further exploration and consideration are recommended to develop effective design of immersive learning spaces.
• Sourcing and using appropriate multimedia to support the immersive learning design.  Including ability to select available and appropriate video and still image assets to different situation or contexts.  Users can easily be taken out of an immersive experience, especially when visually and auditory don't work as expected.
• Identifying, in some learning situations, the physical or digital environment map and interactable elements before roaming free in the learning event to avoid wasting unnecessary time.
• General configuration, maintenance and care for immersive technologies.

Opportunities – when to use

Based on Laurillard’s (2012) six learning types,  IL and VR type activities may be suitably designed, predominantly, around practice, investigation and collaboration learning type modalities (MacDowell & Lock, 2022).  Enabling choreographed and scaffolded real-world scenarios and situations to be explored and inquired, leading to the practising and testing of knowledge and skills.  Leaning more into the practice learning type which is effective when students are given the opportunity to apply theory to practice, this can be achieved through learning by doing or experiential learning activities.  These type of activities enable students to learn and practise responses/actions and allowing opportunities to receive feedback via self-reflection, peer, lecturer or through the activity itself.  In order to improve their response/action through next time (Laurillard 2012: Scott 2022).

The following principles introduced by Clark (2022: Scott 2023) can provide a base for defining pedagogies, and to inform the design and development base VR and immersive learning experiences.

1. Emotion – intense.  Emotional connection and affective impact to induce motivation.
2. Attention – total focus.  An environment that commands and maintains undivided attention.  Blocking distractions and focusing on the experience to create full immersion.
3. Experiential – learn by doing.  Carrying out real-world tasks to develop individuals recall and performance in response to something.
4. Context – keep it real.  Use of real-world information, equipment, tasks and colleagues/clients/patients etc.
5. Collaboration – communicating and working together as avatars or outside of the VR.
6. Transfer – to real world.  Applying the knowledge learnt from the VR world into the real world.
7. Retention (recall) – increases.  Consolidated long-term memory needs conditions (focused, vivid, intense, relevant, real, practical, contextualised, the impossible) and repeated practice to develop competent recall.

To supplement the above, considering Conole et al’s Forms of Activity (2004) continuum or axes approach, can help identify and articulate what and where the value is in each continuum or axes: individual <> social, information <> experiential, non-reflection <> reflection.  Furthermore, help analyse the intended learning design along with the digital tools and hardware that can support it.  For example, the difference and value of in-person synchronous immersive ‘3D’ experience, over an online asynchronous ‘2D’ experience.

To help consider pedagogy in the design of immersive learning, consider the following pedagogical and content prompts.  Adapted and expanded from Johnson-Glenberg’s Quality of Immersive VR in Education Rubric (QUIVRR) structure (Fugate & Macrine, 2022 p. 252)

1. Define clear learning objectives that are in alignment to curriculum outcomes.
2. Define how the learning objectives support higher order thinking and metacognition.  Consider evaluating through the Substitution, Augmentation, Modification and Redefinition (SAMR) model.
3. Define if and how scaffolding needs to be present.  E.g. does the intended activity build up in complexity?
4. Determine if the intended learning objectives are appropriate for immersive, VR, AR or XR environments.  Is the multimedia content afforded through such approaches?
5. Identify the value of VR; with or without head set, synchronous or asynchronous, online or offline, same location or remote.
6. Identify where users have agency and control over the learning, interactions, movements and decisions in the intended activity.  And are these congruent or reinforcing concepts of the multimedia content?
7. Develop appropriate supporting learning material such as instructions, briefs and signposting to aid the immersive learning experience.
8. Design an appropriate induction or tutorial exercise to ease users into the immersive environment, and provide appropriate guidance and safety advice where required.
9. Identify where performative feedback will be given before, during and post activity.
10. Determine where and how assessment will be conducted, if required.

Reflection

Identify suitable opportunities where you could you use IL or VR in your own teaching practices.

References

Chalmers, D. J. (2017). The virtual and the real. Disputatio, 9(46), 309–352. https://doi.org/10.1515/disp-2017-0009

Clark, D (2022) Learning Experience Design: How to Create Effective Learning that Works. London: Kogan Page.

Conole, G., Dyke, M., Oliver, M. and Seale, J. (2004) 'Mapping pedagogy and tools for effective learning design', Computers and Education, vol. 43, nos.1–2, pp.17–33.

Fugate, J M B. Macrine, S L. (2022) Movement Matters: How Embodied Cognition Informs Teaching and Learning. The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England

Dick, E. (2021, August 30). The promise of immersive learning: Augmented and virtual reality’s potential in education. Information Technology& Innovation Foundation. https://itif.org/publications/2021/08/30/promise-immersive-learning-augmented-and-virtual-reality-potential [Accessed 1 March 2024].

Laurillard, D (2012) Teaching as a Design Science: Building Pedagogical Patterns for Learning and Technology. London: Routledge.

MacDowell, P. Lock, J (2022) Immersive Education: Designing for Learning. Cham: Springer.

Scott, D (2022) Digital Learning, Teaching and Assessment for HE and FE Practitioners. Northwich: Critical Publishing.

Scott, D (2023) Exploring a pedagogical rationale for VR and immersive learning [Online]. Available from: https://danielscott86.blogspot.com/2023/06/exploring-a-pedagogical-rationale-for-vr-and-immersive-learning.html [Accessed 1 March 2024].

Scott, D (2024) What is Immersive Learning and VR? [Online]. Available from: https://danielscott86.blogspot.com/2024/03/what-is-immersive-learning-and-vr.html [Accessed 8 March 2024].

Trialling VR scenarios in the curriculum

This piece of work forms part of my longer-term vision and specialism in Virtual Reality (VR) and immersive learning, contributing to my current efforts:

• Virtual Reality wall
• Exploring a pedagogical rationale for VR and immersive learning
• Enabling positive Virtual Reality and immersive learning adoption: a journey of integrating VR walls
• TILT Virtual Reality and Immersive Learning practice and scholarship group
• What is Immersive Learning and VR?
• Assessing the current position of the IHAP VR Walls

Oxford Medical Simulation (OMS) VR simulation platform enables users to engage and practice on demand patient care in true-to-life simulation scenarios, from their computer or VR headset.  Allowing users to learn from detailed feedback reports and track their progress via personalised analytics.  I personally like this VR content and platform as I have not seen any other product as high-quality as this, especially in terms of the interaction and improving knowledge; critical thinking and problem-solving skills, decision-making and testing knowledge within the scenarios.

After having an online demonstration of Oxford Medical Simulations in March 2023, including Bodyswaps around the same time which I was curious of and can gain access to.  I originally pursued an asynchronous approach with the overall purpose of obtaining feedback to generate use/business cases on prospective pedagogical purpose and interest for our subjects.  And to complement our existing VR suites and look to purchasing some headsets.  This piece also supports my digital learning strategy objective by scaling up our VR and immersive learning, through having access to VR-based content and the ability to use VR headsets with purpose – we have neither at the moment, but are actively used in other Higher Education Institutions.  After a couple of attempts of this, the timing wasn't right and it didn't take off.  However, one of the paramedic lecturers I invited to get involved in this attended a conference in Summer 2023.  He keenly contacted me afterwards to see how we can implement such equipment, reviving this piece of work and becoming a collaborator alongside me.  We met in August and discussed and combined our shared ambitions.  We held another meeting and invited a advanced clinical practice lecturer to widen the discussion on a potential business case and how we should approach it.  As we identified, this would be very costly and the current climate of tighten budgets and priorities wouldn't allow.  So we decided to see this as a fact finding and feedback obtaining exercise, to build a business case for long-term implementation and have the information in place when we have a greenlight.  I later discussed these plans with my Head and she was in agreement and confirmed the financial restrictions.  It was later arranged through OMS in October to hold a demonstration of the scenarios and use with headsets.  This was a success and acquired some positive feedback from students and staff.  OMS later suggested setting up a 45-day trial to experience for a longer period and obtain more feedback, to support our business case - we were keen with this idea and wanted to proceed.  With the hope that a license can be secured for ongoing use and integration into our curriculum area.   I had a particular interest and emphasis on curriculum content connection on how it will be used, rather than people being excited by it then not to be used.  The drivers are two-fold: 1) pedagogy – the value it will bring to the curriculum; critical thinking skills, decision-making , practical skills development, support simulated practice hours and placement preparation.  Identifying strong needs and connections so that such equipment is used frequently and not stuck on shelves.  As well as ensuring that we deliver what we promise on our highly technology-enabled building and facilities (promoted on website) - we don't want to false advertise and be labelled fraudulent.  2) Technology – innovative and modern; keeping our digital curriculum current and competitive.

From 19th February 2024, I coordinated a 45-day trial of the scenarios with a handful of lecturers and some of their student groups.  Including an in-person demonstration on 27th February for both staff and students.  Primarily aimed for wider staff and students to experience the scenarios and technology, develop ideas on further possibilities, and to obtain further feedback to support the development of a potential business case for when funds to become available.  With the hope of evidencing the student and curriculum needs of why such technology is needed to support their learning through such immersive modalities.

Whilst I am pleased with OMS, as this business case develops I will therefore need to evaluate other platforms and technologies to make comparable decisions.  Of which one I was unable to attend in 2022, hosted centrally in the School of Social Sciences as part of a staff development day, Medical Realities.  However, the questionnaire for the trial includes questions around comparisons to previous experiences and technologies.  

I'll update this blog post as this piece develops.