5 ways virtual reality is being used in education right now
By Meris Stansbury
1. For new research: using a state-of-the-art “haptic” floor of aeronautic metal that vibrates and moves to stimulate the physical world for research on how VR has the potential to change the way users feel and behave. There may also be implications for confronting racism, sexism, and aiding in
empathy and humanitarian efforts, says Bailenson.
2. For coding and 3D design:
According to Bob Nilsson, director of Vertical Solutions Marketing for Extreme Networking, the University of Maryland, College Park, now offers a class on virtual reality that gives students the opportunity to design their own interactive world, work with 3D audio and experiment with immersive technology through a combination of hands-on learning and case studies. Also, the University of Georgia is offering similar classes where students design and explore applications for VR. Conrad Tucker, an assistant professor of engineering at Pennsylvania State University, has received funding to build a virtual engineering lab where students hold, rotate, and fit together virtual parts as they would with their real hands.
3. For anatomy and dissection: Said one Extreme Networks survey respondent, “Our students have been developing a VR model of a cow’s anatomy for dissection and study. You have the ability to drill down to the circulatory system, brain, muscle, skeleton, etc. Our applied tech program is using VR in conjunction with Autocad for models of projects they design.”
4. For engagement: A whopping 68 percent of survey respondents said the major benefit of using VR in education is to excite students about the subject matter. 39 percent said it’s great for encouraging creativity.
5. For field trips: Google has eliminated restrictions on Expeditions, their VR field trips program. Google Expeditions was cited in the survey as one of the most popular sources of VR content, but with the complaint that it was a restricted program.
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Virtual reality may have its place, but until traditional education moves away from their 20th century teaching methodology and replaces it with educationally innovative, 21st century learning methodology, within a blended and flipped learning environment, virtual reality is currently, much ado about nothing.
Unless any new application is educationally innovative and directly and measurably contributes to effective, efficient, consistent, affordable, relevant advanced student success outcomes for ALL students, future innovations must wait for current innovations to be implemented.
This process of appriate choice and appropriate implemention must start at the top and be beta tested for measured student success before its rolled out system wide.
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Virtual Reality to Drive Rapid Adoption of 360 Degree Cameras
By David Nagel
https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/08/31/virtual-reality-to-drive-rapid-adoption-of-360-degree-cameras.aspx
VR’s applications for education have been much lauded, and tech heavyweights have begun investing in the technology, in part to both enable and capitalize on educational opportunities. Google, for example, has been offering its low-cost Google Cardboard kits, which, coupled with the Google Expeditions service, provides VR-based educational experiences and learning activities.
according to market research firm ABI Research, some 6 million consumer and prosumer cameras are expected to ship by 2021. (That’s out of a total of 70 million VR devices that are forecast to ship by then.)
Five Ethical Considerations For Using Virtual Reality with Children and Adolescents
Five Ethical Considerations For Using Virtual Reality with Children and Adolescents
G+ link https://plus.google.com/+TessPajaron/posts/8YYgjoPrQvq
In an address to the VRX conference in San Francisco, noted game developer and tech wizard, Jesse Schell predicted that over 8 million VR gamer headsets will be sold in 2016. Facebook purchased Oculus Rift, presumably laying the groundwork for a future where friends and family will interact in rich virtual spaces. All the major players, including Microsoft, Sony, Samsung, Google and an HTC and Valve partnership are jostling for the consumer headset market.
Experimenting with VR in his classes as part of a project piloted by Seattle-based foundry10, a privately funded research organization that creates partnerships with educators to implement, research and explore the various intersections of emerging technologies and learning, including VR..
And the technology’s potential for good is vast. It has already been used to help with autism, improve personal financial management, treat PTSD and manage pain. More and more news outlets, including the New York Times, are adopting immersive journalism, where news stories can be experienced through VR.
As an educational tool, VR might prove transformative. Google Expeditions allows students to take over 100 virtual journeys from ancient Rome to the surface of Mars. It might also have a big impact on social emotional learning (SEL), as VR’s unique ability to produce empathy recently led Wired magazine to explore its potential as “the ultimate empathy machine”. Addressing a persistent anxiety, Suter used Samsung Gear’s Public Speaking Simulator to successfully prepare a few nervous students for class presentations, reporting they felt “much more calm” during the live delivery.
Ethical Considerations
In a recently published article, researchers Michael Madary and Thomas K. Metzinger from Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany review a series of ethical considerations when implementing VR. The illusion of embodiment may provide VR’s greatest value to education, but also lies at the heart of its ethical implementation. Madary and Metzinger believe that VR is not just an evolution from television and video game screens, but a revolution that will have an enormous social impact. In their paper, they claim that:
VR technology will eventually change not only our general image of humanity but also our understanding of deeply entrenched notions, such as “conscious experience,” “selfhood,” “authenticity,” or “realness.”
It’s important to remember that many current VR uses in schools, like Google Expeditions, are not interactive VR, but simply 360-degree video experiences. In these cases, students experience immersive 3D pictures or panoramas, but do not deeply interact with the content. The illusion of embodiment is a product of interactive content and motion tracking, where users can alter and affect their environment and engage with others who share their virtual space. Headsets like the Vive and Occulus Rift fall under this latter category, but it won’t be long before most, if not all, consumer oriented VR technology will be completely immersive and interactive.
1. Long-Term Effects and Prolonged Exposure
2. The Impact of Environment on Agency and Behavior
3. Aggravating Preexisting Psychological or Emotional Issues
4. (Un)Reality and Diminished Real World Interactions
5. Privacy and Data Gathering
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more on virtual reality in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=virtual+reality
What Researchers Want Teachers to Know About Virtual Reality’s Health Risks
By Jenny Abamu Feb 16, 2018
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-02-16-what-researchers-want-teachers-to-know-about-virtual-reality-s-health-risks
with Google ramping up sales of its Expeditions Kit, and Facebook giving away 500 free Oculus Rift headsets to schools in Arkansas, the number of teachers using VR tools in U.S. classrooms could jump to more than 15 percent by 2021, predicts Futuresource, a market research firm.
A recent study was done by Children and Virtual Reality, a collaboration between researchers, VR companies, universities and health organizations, found that using VR tools could have significant health impacts on children.
What the researchers found in the third phase of the study, published last October, was that usage of VR headsets could impact a child’s vision, balance and spatial awareness
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Riddell, R. (2018, February 2). Ed shouldn’t invest heavily in VR yet, but experimentation is key. Retrieved February 2, 2018, from
https://www.educationdive.com/news/ed-shouldnt-invest-heavily-in-vr-yet-but-experimentation-is-key/516160/
Google,
for instance, has made virtual field trips to inaccessible locations easier for history and social studies classes with its Cardboard viewers used in conjunction with the Expeditions app. And
technologies like zSpace have expanded opportunities in STEM subjects with virtual interactive dissections, diagrams and experiments.
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more on VR in education in this IMS blog
5 ways virtual reality is being used in education right now
October 17th, 2016
Stansbury, M. (2016, October 17). 5 ways virtual reality is being used in education right now. Retrieved January 26, 2017, from
http://www.eschoolnews.com/2016/10/17/5-ways-virtual-reality-used-education-right-now/
A
new survey from Extreme Networks aimed to answer this question by polling nearly 350 schools within higher ed and K-12. According to the results, 23 percent of respondents have tested VR, while 77 percent have not (40 percent of schools polled still aren’t sure if they’ll use the technology in the future). Meaning that although virtual reality has an important and growing role in education, it may take several years to get all institutions on board.
The survey notes that one challenge to implementation is that nearly two-thirds of schools are “somewhat or not sure” their IT infrastructure can currently support VR technology.
Respondents also had concerns about the lack of VR content available, as well as a lack of student resources, with 43 percent of respondents saying that VR is too expensive or difficult to implement. However, one respondent is taking this approach to providing VR to students at low or no cost: “We are putting out a call for old smartphone donations in our [community for those] who no longer need them. With the donations, we’re making sets of Google Cardboard and phones to create traveling VR stations for classes in all of our buildings.”
1. For new research: According to the Wall Street Journal, Professor Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of the Virtual Reality Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University, is using a state-of-the-art “haptic” floor of aeronautic metal that vibrates and moves to stimulate the physical world for research on how VR has the potential to change the way users feel and behave. For example, spending time flying around the world like Superman in virtual reality has been shown to increase participants’ altruistic actions outside of the lab. There may also be implications for confronting racism, sexism, and aiding in
empathy and humanitarian efforts, says Bailenson. (see more in about
empathy and VR in this IMS blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2015/11/18/immersive-journalism/)
2. For coding and 3D design:
a class on virtual reality that gives students the opportunity to design their own interactive world, work with 3D audio and experiment with immersive technology through a combination of hands-on learning and case studies. Also, the University of Georgia is offering similar classes where students design and explore applications for VR.
3. For anatomy and dissection:
4. For engagement: A whopping 68 percent of survey respondents said the major benefit of using VR in education is to excite students about the subject matter. 39 percent said it’s great for encouraging creativity.
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July 26th, 2016
Sixty percent of surveyed teachers said they would like virtual reality to become a part of their students’ learning experience, according to the study from Samsung Electronics America, Inc. and GfK.
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Virtual reality helping Calif. students overcome learning barriers | eSchool News. (2016, June). Retrieved January 26, 2017, from
http://www.eschoolnews.com/2016/06/21/virtual-reality-helping-calif-students-overcome-learning-barriers/
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more on VR in education in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=virtual+reality
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