Online Social Learning through Virtual Reality

In 2018 with a gift from the Mozilla Foundation, researchers at Georgia Tech began exploring the potential applicability of virtual reality to remote synchronous online education. This research takes place in the context of Georgia Tech’s online Master of Science in Computer Science program, which as of Fall 2019 has 9000 active students, making it the largest such program in the world.

As part of this project, these researchers constructed four virtual environments, each intended to replicate a common environment that is available to on-campus students but historically has been unavailable to online students. The first is the idea of a virtual lecture hall; while lectures are not always the most desirable instructional structure, they are common in online learning due to the efficiency of presenting them asynchronously. The goal of these virtual lecture halls is to reintroduce the social and communal elements of shared lecture hall space: students may watch the recorded lecture together with shared controls for pausing and rewinding the material to allow for discussion.

A second environment is a virtual professor’s lab. This lab mimics the physical area on campus where students in the professor’s classes may come to ask questions. This function is similar to office hours, but structured to be more social: students might come with private questions, but might also come merely to work independently in the same environment as other students in the same class, or as the professor. The goal of this environment is to create the sort of unbounded environment seen on college campuses where organic interaction may take place.

A third environment is a virtual student lounge. This is similar to the virtual professor’s lab, but without the anchoring official presence. These environments target more social learning opportunities, where students may discuss the course material more freely, work together on group projects, or study together in an area with peripheral participation from their classmates. These are analogues for existing social communities that exist online, and address the question of whether virtual reality aids in the formation of social bonds online.

A fourth environment is a virtual poster session. Like traditional poster sessions, these involve presenters setting up virtual posters around a virtual environment, and attendees perusing the posters and conversing with the presenters.

A key component of these environments is their domain-neutrality. Significant research in the past has been devoted to constructing VR simulations for use in medical, military, and engineering training, but these are typically tightly coupled with the content knowledge that is being expressed. This project is distinct in that the environments are general to any content at any level: anything from middle school English classes to graduate-level Computer Science classes includes constructs like synchronous discussions, lecture-viewing, office hours, and social learning spaces. Thus, this presentation is constructed to be of value to anyone, regardless of level or domain.

After designing these environments, we tested these settings with hundreds of students in graduate-level CS classes in Spring 2019. The results present significant lessons for anyone interested in leveraging virtual reality in their classes. Most pertinently, we gleaned four lessons, which we will present in further depth in this workshop:

• Despite the proliferation of social media and online communities, online students feel as isolated now as they did 20-30 years ago when online options began to sprang up, but lacked the social infrastructure in place. This isolation has not resolved itself.
• Students are excited about the potential of VR in education, even when they have not had positive experiences with it themselves—or even when they themselves have had underwhelming experiences. Students in one study were more eager to repeat a VR experiment than a more traditional activity, even while simultaneously reflecting that they got more out of the traditional activity.
• The VR system was seen by many students as distracting, and yet they still expressed a desire to continue using it—this suggested to us that the social benefits added by the VR environment are sufficient to make up for the distractions.
• There remain significant technological obstacles to the widespread use of VR in education. Online education has proliferated because most people already own the devices they can use to consume it—smartphones, home computers, and the internet. Very few students have VR equipment, and the number of platforms is large, leading to significant compatibility issues. Hybrid systems like Mozilla Hubs may help address this gap as they allow students without VR hardware to participate without making that initial investment.

After presenting the system and our results, the workshop will open access for attendees to experiment with the environment themselves. We'll bring a handful of headsets so attendees can experience it in virtual reality, but in line with one of the lessons above, we'll also allow attendees to create their own rooms on their own devices. Most importantly, because of the open nature of Mozilla Hubs, these lessons will be directly transferable to their own classes: anyone can create and use a Mozilla Hubs room in their classroom right now—with or without a VR headset—and in this workshop, we'll show attendees how.