The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated technology adoption in stunning ways. Almost every area of work and life today is connected online with their target audience or consumers. Education is also a thriving sector with more and more students studying online and institutions exploring new ways of teaching in hybrid classrooms. Technology adoption has now become an inevitable reality. In this direction, Stanford University has launched a class that will be taught entirely in virtual reality (VR). It is the first VR class in the university’s history.
Communications professor Jeremy Bailenson took a gamble when setting up the class. He didn’t know if the necessary software and technology would be ready for him to teach it as a summer school. However, Bailenson, who has been teaching the subject for 20 years, was lucky. The software he eventually chose to teach his class was ready just in time, at the end of May. The software – called Engage – allows students and teachers to communicate in virtual environments.
Cyan DeVeaux, a classroom teaching assistant, said VR allows people to imagine the impossible. “The only limitation of this assignment is the student’s own imagination,” said the teaching assistant, referring to the scene-building assignment.
The lesson was designed so that each session was limited to 30 minutes to avoid simulator sickness. Another concern was privacy. Bailenson asked Facebook to allow students to use fake accounts to protect their privacy, and in return he offered to use the headset from Oculus, a subsidiary of Facebook’s parent company Meta.
Bailenson and DeVeaux have taught two classes so far and collected more than 3,000 hours of data. They now hope that the data collected during the course will lead to discoveries in behavioral adaptation to VR and its educational adoption.
