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    Monday, December 6, 2021

    Stanford University Launches First Class Taught Entirely in Virtual Reality

    The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of the technology in an astonishing way. Almost all areas of work and life are now connected online to their target audience or consumers.

    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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