Education is also a booming sector with more and more
students studying online and institutions trying new ways of teaching in hybrid
classrooms. The adoption of technology has now become an inevitable reality. In
this direction, Stanford University has launched a course that will take place
entirely in virtual reality (VR). This is the first virtual reality course in
the history of the university.
See also Meta
presents prototype haptic glove, will allow users to feel objects in VR
Communication teacher Jeremy Bailenson made a bet when he
formatted the class. He was unsure whether the required software and technology
would be ready for him to teach it in a summer school. Bailenson, who has been
teaching the subject for 20 years, was fortunate, however.
The software he eventually chose to teach his class was
ready just in time at the end of May. With the software, dubbed Engage,
students and teachers can interact in virtual environments.
Cyan DeVeaux, a teaching assistant for the class, said
virtual reality allows people to imagine the impossible. “The only limitation
to this task is a student’s own imagination,” said the teaching assistant,
referring to the task of building scenes.
The class was designed so that each session is limited to 30
minutes to avoid simulator sickness. Another concern was confidentiality.
Bailenson asked Facebook to allow students to use fake accounts in order to
protect their privacy and in return he offered to use the headset of Oculus, a
subsidiary of Facebook’s parent company, Meta.
Bailenson and DeVeaux have taught two courses so far and
collected over 3,000 hours of data. They now hope that the data collected
during the course will stimulate discoveries about behavioral adaptation to
virtual reality and its pedagogical adoption.
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