Virtually Learning: 10 things to consider when developing an educational VR app

It’s been great to see more and more educational VR content being launched over the last couple of years, across a range of platforms. However, whilst there are some fantastic apps out there that look great and clearly have had a lot of time and energy put into their development, I often find them lacking in two main areas. Firstly, the fact that some educational VR apps aren’t built on a solid pedagogical foundation. What I mean by this is that whilst some apps are built to be these awesome, jaw-dropping experiences, they do not function practically within an actual classroom environment or offer genuine learning opportunities. Secondly, I think that some developers do not give enough consideration to the fact that their end users are children and thus the way that they interact with digital media may be different to an adult.

BETT 2018 - Microsoft Worldwide Education VR developers will often reach out to me to test apps and provide feedback on their experiences, which is something I’m always happy to do. What I find is that I make a lot of common suggestions and so I thought I’d take the opportunity to share 10 key things to consider when developing an educational VR experience:

The length of the experience

The school day is jam-packed and time is of the essence when it comes to planning a single lesson. The simple fact is that a lesson that integrates a VR experience will also include other activities. Perhaps the VR is used as a stimulus for a writing task, maybe it is being used as a virtual approach to a practical science experiment – whatever the case, there will be other elements to the lesson. As such, a VR experience that is too long will be far more difficult to integrate into a lesson plan. Shorter, more focused experiences will always be more practical for use in the classroom. Another consideration here is the impact of VR on children and whilst the data on this is still limited, most educators would not wish to have young learners inside VR for an extended period of time. I’ve come across some stellar educational content in my time that simply isn’t viable for deployment in the classroom as it takes far too long.

The way information is conveyed

This is another common issue I come across. If the experience relies too heavily on in-app text, the accessibility level plummets. Depending on the reading level of the students, some may find the app difficult to navigate from an early point in the experience. It’s something I’ve spoken about during presentations on inclusion in the broader spectrum of EdTech. In general, a good approach is to apply a more language-neutral interface. You see this a lot in the core Apple apps – the use of common symbols to make navigation more intuitive. Taking this idea further would be the inclusion of multiple language options as a large proportion of VR content is solely available in English.

The user interface

This idea builds upon the last one somewhat. An unescapable fact is that VR headsets make it harder for teachers to guide students if they are confused or lost since they cannot see their screen. As such if the overall UI is not simple, the teacher may end up in the frustrating position of having to take the headset from the student and help them navigate. Multiply this by a whole class of kids and you can see how this can quickly become an issue! Having a clean, child-friendly interface, with a shallow learning curve, is essential. Want to go further? Try incorporating some support functionality so that a student can get a reminder of what a certain button does or how to interact with an element in the experience.

The age of the students who access your content

If you are developing content about a specific topic, do some research into what age groups cover that topic. For example, in British curriculum schools, the topic of Ancient Greece is often covered in KS2 (when students are around 9-11 years old.) I had to avoid integrating an excellent app themed around Ancient Greece last year as it contained full frontal nudity – not something an educator should be exposing students of that age to! Similarly, I’ve had to veto apps because the content was aimed too high (or sometimes too low) for a specific age group. I was asked to find a Haunted House experience to use as a part of a Year 7 English class (to support the writing of ghost stories) but most of the content I found was far too terrifying for kids that age. Which leads me to…

VR Education In School

Child protection and esafety

Remember, as educators we are accountable to our students’ families so we always have to be careful what digital media content we are using in the classroom. VR is in its infancy and there’s no escaping the fact that some people are still wary of its effects so if content can be construed as inappropriate in any way, an educator would shy away from it. This could mean content like the Ancient Greece and Haunted House examples given above or simply content that links to social media platforms in some way. In the long term, the biggest issue will probably become the use of shared, multi-user worlds by students. Incidents of indecency and cyber-bullying have been evidenced in platforms like Minecraft and Roblox so the concerns will likely transpose.

The authenticity of the content

Ensuring that the content within an educational VR experience is as authentic as possible is important is it is going to win over teachers. I’ve seen some wonderful examples of well-researched content that contains excellent levels of authentic detail but I’ve also seen examples where perhaps a little too much creative license has been taken. There have even been a handful of instances where I’ve seen key terminology spelt in correctly or mistaken facts! If you are developing an historical experience for use in a History classroom, you have to assume that the educator will be well-versed in the period being covered in the app. Ensuring that standards are high (i.e. you’ve done your homework and researched the content thoroughly) and the experience is as authentic as possible (e.g. it’s based on primary sources as in apps like Titanic VR) will make a more compelling case for its adoption in classrooms.

Alignment to curricula

This is the other key area to ensure adoption rates are high. Wherever you are based, schools will have different curricula that they follow and potentially different standards or objectives that need to be met. Taking the time to verse yourself in these will mean that your experience is more carefully aligned to the needs of schools and will make it easier for them to quickly identify the potential benefits of adopting your platform.

Content diversity

There are certain topics in the world of VR (and AR) education that are almost too common at this point, dinosaurs and outer space being prime culprits. Before developing a VR experience for use in the classroom, make sure that you’ve done some competitor analysis and checked out how many comparable apps already exist. If someone’s already covered a specific theme, that doesn’t make it impracticable but make sure that you’re approaching the content from a new angle or offering a unique experience. Conversely, there are several key areas of learning that are massively underserved and as such would potentially make for great themes for an open-minded developer (I’m still waiting for a great Viking VR app!)

Vikings: Beyond the Legend

The level of student autonomy and activity

VR as a medium has the potential to elevate learning above traditional media consumption but for this to take place, the student needs to be actively engaged and have a greater degree of autonomy. Interaction is the key as it makes an experience less passive. This could mean giving the learner some form of locomotion, allowing them to highlight elements for more information or actually interacting with objects to facilitate changes in the experience. The level of technology being used as the vehicle for the VR experience will play a role here of course but even mobile VR can offer a fairly interactive experience if it is approached in the right way (just look at apps like Mars Walk VR or the Inspyro VR range.)

The ability to demonstrate learning

This last point really is the missing secret sauce in the majority of VR experiences aimed at the education market. Very few VR experiences offer the ability for students to evidence learning without actually leaving the experience and completing an analogue task. Now there’s nothing wrong with doing things this way – it just means that the educator has to produce the means to let their students “show what they know” in another way. There are some apps which allow users to save and export their learning or demonstrate it in some form. Tilt Brush is a great example as it allows virtual artists to record and export images, GIFs and videos of a piece of work. Another impressive example is the integration of live quiz deployment directly within the Engage platform from Immersive VR Education, allowing social VR experiences like virtual field trips and lectures to be delivered to groups of students and then have them assessed right there in the app. It also means that data can be collated midway through a session to gauge the level of understanding and perhaps adjust the flow of the lesson.

So, there you go. Hopefully there were some ideas in there that developers find useful and perhaps hadn’t considered before. I’d also recommend reaching out to schools directly to forge partnerships and test-beds for your projects. Working collaboratively, we can elevate the VR education ecosystem even further as we head into 2019 and beyond.

October 15, 2018

The Modern Alternative Learning Resource: Time To Drop The Ban On Phones In Schools?

As one of the many ‘hats’ that I have to wear in my current job, I am often interacting with the education system, from school through to university, and I typically find myself wondering why are teachers still locked into using delivery methods that were considered old when I was at school? There has always been a stigma about mobile phones within the classroom, and when I was at school I could understand why, this was before the day of smartphones and as such they had no use within a classroom. These days almost all mobile phones hiding in the pockets of kids are smart phones, and usually good ones at that, such is the need of the current school generation. Yet despite all this processing and interactive power, mobile phones are still outlawed in the vast majority of schools during lesson time, which I feel is a massive disservice to the students’ ability to learn and engage in subject content.

BETT 2018 - Google Education Now I will say before I get into ways to utilise what kids already have, there are schools and colleges out there that actively do develop ways of using smart phones within the class, but we are still talking about the minority unfortunately. Obviously, we must consider that the education system is largely locked into what is demanded of them by the curriculum that is set, and some subjects are less applicable to a tech solution than others. I genuinely feel that given some proper thought most lessons can incorporate a smart phone into its delivery. Below are just some of my thoughts on lessons that could benefit from this addition of mobile technology.

History

History has always been for many, a dry and beige topic at best (though for myself it was fascinating) This has always made it hard to engage the wider class, save for a few historians like I was. The reason being is that it’s a lot of reading text, looking at images or re-enactments that are typically not the most authentic or well-acted things ever.

Instead of being stuck behind paragraphs in a book, teachers should have access to interactive content that students can access via apps on their phone, this app could allow students turn a table top into an augmented reality (AR)battlefield, act as the commander to move the troops and ultimately see the outcome of the battle. This offers a chance for the kids to see historic moments from a different view point, and interact with it, altering the mechanics and being able to understand the consequences of certain actions within those scenarios.

Android mobile phones would allow students to become immersed into virtual reality (VR) experiences where they can get a first-person perspective on living in that period, having to carry out typical tasks of the time interacting with virtual objects, allowing for a greater appreciation for the challenges of that era.

Science

Science was once a subject that was a favourite, and still is, amongst most students thanks in large part due to the fact there is a strong practical element during lessons, through experiments. However, as regulations, health and safety and the like become stricter, the number of cool things kids can do in the classroom is dwindling.

The best way to get around this is again using interactive experiences on phones, simply through gamification of the learning experience. Students could be tasked with mixing chemicals in VR, carefully having to measure out amounts, using instruments to monitor changes. This can all be done using the controllers supplied with Google Daydream or Samsung Gear VR headsets, allowing for the precision needed in experiment scenarios. Even if budget was an issue, and with education it usually is, being immersed in 360⁰ video demonstrations using Google Cardboard headsets would be a positive start as a use case for further investment.

The major advantage being there is no risk to a student as it is all digital, eliminating the health and safety issues that are limiting practical sessions from currently being carried out. With all things that have an element of gamification, a competitive element could be introduced to get students to naturally want to do better to be the best, through a level system or leader board.

English

English is and has always been about a lot of reading, there is no escaping it, nor should there be. That does not mean that students should be stuck just reading books upon books, carrying large piles of novels, papers and the like. Even something as simple as E-books would be a move in the right direction, allowing students to download them onto their phone, also getting rid of the excuses of leaving content at home by said students.

However, being able to maximise a student’s ability to become truly invested in the subject matter, why not allow them to go through the story as one of the characters. Empathy is a major part of being able to get engaged with a topic, it has been thoroughly explored that with VR, empathy can quickly and impactfully applied to the situation being explored. This does not have to be a fully interactive process, it could just be seen through the eyes of a selected character, giving students a choice of who to follow through the story and being able to see how things play out from different points of view, even gleaming insight from the inner thoughts of the character being followed.

Books can have AR markers embedded into their pages, giving the ability to see the page play out as an animation or interactive scene, this again catering for those who have different learning styles or difficulties. The act of reading is essential, but arguably the aim of many books is to create an emotional empathetic response in their reader, and to be able to continue to engage with a modern audience, the delivery needs to become more diverse.

Other subjects

As I stated, technically any subject could embrace the mobile phone and EdTech resource within their content, however the above I feel are some of the subjects that might have the biggest impact in terms of engagement. Computing lessons could utilise phones as an entry level device to learn to develop VR or AR experiences, giving students the opportunity at a younger age to begin to learn the skills that are becoming more crucial than even to be developed on mass. Mathematics would benefit from gamification of mathematical problems, catering for different learning styles and allowing students to come at the problem from a different angle that just works better for them. Art and other creative subjects could use phones as research or art pads letting students draw directly onto the screen for sketching before moving onto a larger scale final drawing, or even as far as utilising VR art tools, turning the controller into the brush and pen.

Tilt Brush - Audio Reactive_1 Ultimately it is about the schools being willing to lift the stigma of mobile phones in schools and searching for new and innovative ways of bringing them back into the classroom, making subject content presented in a more relevant way to the audience it is meant for. Just as other industries have had to move with the times to stay competitive, so to do schools in their education methods.

October 10, 2018

Using Virtual Reality Setups For Education

In the first article in this series (which you can read here) I focused on why I think schools should look at investing in a high-end virtual reality (VR) setup like a Rift or a Vive. This time I’m going to focus on the more practical side of things and look at how a school can integrate a single setup or limited number of them.

The analogy I drew last time was to the days gone by when schools only had one TV or a single PC and it would be moved from class to class on a cart of some kind. If you can only afford a single Rift or Vive, the first thing to consider is whether you want to follow a similar approach to this. In other words, the school could invest in a VR Ready laptop rather than a desktop and mount base stations on tripods rather than fix them to the walls in a dedicated space. This approach would give you the flexibility to set up in multiple locations but the trade-off would be that there is more prep time required to begin using the equipment. Obviously for some schools this wouldn’t be viable due to space limitations and in fact the number of power points that are accessible in a room can also be a factor. Nonetheless, this would be the logistical approach I would recommend to those in a position to work like this as it means that a Vive/Rift can be used in parallel to other tech (which I will come on to shortly.)

A Sixth Form student at JESS Dubai using an HTC Vive for an Art project.

One last consideration would be staff. We are lucky at JESS Dubai inn that my role as Head of Digital Learning and Innovation allows me to work with various departments across our three schools as and when they need me. As such when a team want to embed the use of one of our Vives our Acer Windows Mixed Reality (WMR) headset into a unit of study, we can usually coordinate schedules so that I can be with them to help facilitate. Some schools will have a technology coordinator or similar role who may be able to do the same. If not, perhaps a member of an IT support staff team could help. Of course option three is that the teacher themselves is trained to use the technology and coordinates its use independently. This can be viable of course but as it is likely that other activities will be going on in the room, it may be best to ensure that at least one additional adult is present. The last thing you want it an over-excited student, using VR for the first time, hurting themselves or damaging the equipment. It’s worth noting that if you work with older students, you may be able to sidestep a staffing issue by using them as your VR support staff (perhaps you have student digital leaders that could fulfil this role?) but ultimately that decision would need to be made by the individual educator.

The other thing to consider is the pedagogy of VR integration on this scale. Naturally teachers would never want to have students spend their learning time queuing to have their go on a headset so different approaches need to be considered. I’m going to share five different examples of how I have used a single HTC Vive at JESS Dubai with students.

1. Using high-end VR in parallel with mobile VR

This is the model I use quite frequently. Essentially I will find complementary experiences to use on the Vive and on mobile VR (which we can a lot more headsets for) and students will be able to access one or the other during the session. This may well mean that not every student gets to access the higher-end VR experience every time but names can be logged and if enough VR sessions are hosted throughout the year, they will all get some exposure to more immersive VR. By using the mobile VR in parallel, I tend to find that students are less bothered if they don’t get to use the Vive since they still got to use VR nonetheless. Here’s an example from a project with Year 6 who were learning about World War Two:

2. Using VR as a part of free-flow or carousel activities

Another simple way to integrate VR when equipment is limited is to embed it as a part of a free-flow or carousel. For any non-educators that may be reading, free flow is when a range of activities are set up and students can move between them as they wish during a set amount of time whereas a carousel is when they move between a set number of activities in rotation. Either can work but depending on the ratio of students to HMDs, you may find that use within free flow is better. Avoid letting students queue for their turn and encourage them to complete other activities instead. The VR access could even become a reward for those that complete more activities or work responsibly.

A student using the Acer WMR headset as a part of an Egyptian themed free flow afternoon.

3. Using VR for enrichment with a small group

A class doesn’t always need to be 25+ students. A small number of students could use a VR experience as an enrichment activity to deepen their understanding of a topic or provide them with a unique learning opportunity. This could be mean extending more-able students or providing support for those with additional learning needs. It could even be an optional lunchtime drop-in session for those that are passionate about a topic. Finding ways to limit the group size will mean that more experiences can be delivered and the impact can still be huge. Here’s a clip from a session hosted with a small group of Psychology students from our Sixth Form:

4. Using VR as a design tool

In some cases at JESS Dubai we have been able to use VR as a tool for students to use as-and-when needed. This is mostly the case in departments like Art and DT where students can access VR to either prototype or asses a design as the situation arises. A great example I can offer here was how we used VR within our DT department to augment a 3D design unit. Students used Google SketchUp to create their designs and were then able to drop these into the excellent Kubity app and actually step inside them for evaluation. We even had instances where the teacher went into the design as the student stood by and listened to their verbal feedback. Integrating VR in this way is very organic; it becomes another tool available to students when needed.

5. Using VR collaboratively, in a pair or small group

One approach I have trialled over the last year or so, is to have students work collaboratively using a VR headset. In a pair or small group, students take turns using the headset but when they are not inside the virtual world, they engage with the person who is. For example, a student could be exploring a virtual museum and describe what they are seeing to their peer who records their observations in note form. This not only ensures that more students are involved but it circumvents the inability to record notes whilst using VR (for now at least!) It also encourages the person within the VR space to be more observant and engage with the details more carefully which can deepen their learning experience. This approach may not help you facilitate a large group quickly but it is definitely worth exploring.