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This research is part of an ongoing effort on the efficacy and user experience of TLE TeachLivE™, a 3D mixed reality classroom with simulated students used to facilitate virtual rehearsal of pedagogical skills by teachers. This research investigated a potential relationship between efficacy, in terms of knowledge acquisition and transfer, and user experience in regard to presence, suspension of disbelief, and immersion. The initial case studies examining user experience of presence, suspension of disbelief, and immersion were used to develop a presence questionnaire revised from the work of Witmer and Singer (1998) to address the TLE TeachLivE™ mixed reality environment. The findings suggest that targeted practice, authentic scenarios, and suspension of disbelief in virtual learning environments may impact learning.

New and emerging technology in the field of virtual environments has permitted a certain malleability of learning milieus. These emerging environments allow learning and transfer through interactions that have been intentionally designed to be pleasurable experiences. TLE TeachLivE™ is just such an emerging environment that engages teachers in practice on pedagogical and content aspects of teaching in a simulator. The sense of presence, engagement, and ludus of TLE TeachLivE™ are derived from the compelling Mixed Reality that includes components of off-the shelf and emerging technologies. Some of the noted features that have been identified relevant to the ludic nature of TeachLivE include the flow, fidelity, unpredicability, suspension of disbelief, social presence, and gamelike elements. This article explores TLE TeachLivE™ in terms of the ludology, paideic user experience, the source of the ludus, and outcomes of the ludic nature of the experience.

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Social presence, the sense of connection with another, is more important than ever as teachers, healthcare providers, and other professionals are using immersive tools to facilitate the social interaction for education, training, therapy and collaboration between geographically distributed humans and surrogates (avatars, agents, or robots). Leading researchers cite the subjective nature of the traditional self-report measures of social presence and the absence of a standardized approach to measuring social presence as a constraint to gaining deeper understanding of user’s experiences of emerging and existing tools. This discourse highlights behavioral indicators of social presence that have been identified over decades across disciplines from psychology, communication, computer science, education, and engineering. The authors explicate the behavioral themes of social presence and describe a classification system grounded in exogenic and endogenic themes of social presence. This article goes on to describe the design of a social presence behavioral coding system (SPBCS) instrument that provides a structure to coding behaviors associated with a users’ experience of social presence. The behavioral coding system described in this paper is the first step in creating a robust standardized approach to quantifying social presence through behavioral, physiological, and subjective indicators that ultimately may replace the current standard subjective approaches to describing the user’s experience in all realities.

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