Building Professional Identity for Meaningful Engagement Through a Virtual Reality Teaching Lab

Description

Higher education has a long history of offering professional certifications and accreditations. Increasingly these programs are being informed and improved through unique uses of technology that not only supplement traditional pedagogical practices, but also create new, authentic learning opportunities for students.

This presentation will highlight a Virtual Reality Teaching Lab (VRTL) that has been constructed to provide preservice music education students an opportunity to hone their teaching and engagement skills beyond classroom discussion. Built around Microsoft Kinect, Unity, and the Microsoft Speech Platform, this program provides lifelike engagement with VR benefits.

Takeaway

The theoretical model that was the bases for the creation of the Virtual Reality Teaching Lab (VRTL) was presented at DeL 2015 and well received. We now have a fully functioning prototype that consists of multiple learning/teaching modules. During this session we will present the prototype (live if possible), provide data related to its use by students, and show media of students engaging with the technology.

The intended takeaway from this session is to demonstrate that VR environments are the new frontier in online learning as they allow students to expand knowledge from content-based to experiential.

Abstract

Ryan Fuller, an aerospace engineer turned teacher, famously said “teaching isn’t rocket science, it’s harder” (2013). Why? Because neutrons don’t stay up past their bedtime, propulsion systems don’t fail to work because they just “don’t feel like it today” and because unlike kinetic energy, humans respond differently to stimuli and have various abilities and interests. “To solve engineering problems, you use your brain. Solving classroom problems requires your entire being” (Fuller, 2013). A person can be extremely competent, work relentlessly, and still fail miserably as a teacher, especially in the first year or two on the job. But, what if those failures could occur outside the classroom, before the teacher even got there, instead of with live children?

This session will demonstrate a Virtual Reality Teaching Lab (VRTL). Unlike fully immersive virtual reality, such as the use of Oculus Rift or other 3D headsets, this project has been built from scratch using Microsoft Kinect for movement and proximity to virtual students and the classrooms, coupled with Unity assets and Microsoft Voice to enable voice commands.

This Virtual Reality Teaching Lab allows:

1. Task deconstruction
   The act of teaching to be deconstructed permitting preservice teachers an opportunity to practice teaching components individually before stacking them together into complex tasks. For example, preservice teachers can practice gesture and proximity as related to student engagement before adding in more complex issues of instruction delivery.
2. Observation and feedback
   Preservice teachers can be observed without the distraction of an observer live in the teaching space, which often alters student behavior. This also allows for the preservice teacher to receive feedback from the program and/or an observer, and then immediately re-teach in the exact same scenario as many times as they need to incorporate the feedback they have been given.
3. Extreme situations
   Similar to flight simulators, this program allows for preservice teachers to safely experience extreme teaching moments, such as those that are affected by serve student behavior, ethical or morals dilemmas, and emergency situations. Too often these extreme teaching situations do not occur naturally until after graduation. Practicing them in VR permits an opportunity for feedback and repeated experiences.
4. Understanding and accessibility
   Preservice teachers can experience the classroom in terms of the varying abilities of their future students. It’s one thing to talk about disability and another thing to experience it. With the click of a button in VR, a teacher can turn a full spectrum classroom into one in which reds and green look the same, converting the classroom to look as it might to a student with color blindness. Audio and lighting levels can be adjusted to imitate how the classroom would appear to those with hearing and vision issues. Even the perspective of the room can be changed to mimic the view from a wheelchair. Through this program, preservice teachers can now experience disability in ways that they simply cannot in real life.